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John Ruskin, Preacher 

And Other Essays 



BY 

LEWIS H. CHRISMAN 

Professor of English Literature 
West Virginia Weslejran College 



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TliEJffliiigtoBlma 




THE ABINGDON PRESS 
NEW YORK CINCINNATI 






Copyright, 1921, by 
LEWIS H. CHRISMAN 



OCI 26 1921 



Printed in the United States of America 



Q)C!.A624998 



CONTENTS 



FAOB 



Prefatory Note o 

I, John Ruskin, Preacher 7 

II. Jonathan Edwards 25 

III. Radiant Vigor ^^ 

rV. The Spiritual Message of Whittier 56 

V. The Art of Being Human 75 

VI. The White Water Lily 86 

Vn. The Fundamental Teaching of Thomas 

Carlyle 102 

Vni. Cross-Eyed Souls 129 

IX. The American Heritage 141 

X. Permanent Values in the Biglow Papers. . 163 
XI. Lessening the Denominator 177 



PREFATORY NOTE 

The essay entitled "The White Water Lily" 
first appeared in the Methodist Review and 
*'The Fundamental Teachings of Thomas Car- 
lyle" in The Methodist Review (Quarterly) 
and are republished with the kind consent of 
the editors of the periodicals. Acknowledg- 
ment is also due to Houghton Mifflin Company 
for permission to quote at length from the 
writings of several major American poets, and 
to Charles Scribner's Sons and Dr. Henry J. 
van Dyke for the privilege of quoting two 
stanzas from "The Toiling of Felix." Two 
passages from Leslie Stephen's Hours in a 
Library are quoted through the courtesy of G. 
P. Putnam's Sons. 

L. H. C. 



JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 

Although he wore no black Geneva gown 
and never stood behind the sacred desk, John 
Ruskin all of his days was a golden-mouthed, 
burning-hearted, spiritually minded preacher of 
the truths of God. The Rev. W. P. Paterson, 
a Scottish theologian, recently said, "During 
the bygone century it may be doubted if the 
ornaments of the Christian pulpit did as much 
as lay preachers like Carlyle and Ruskin to 
quicken the social conscience and to com- 
mend lofty ideals in the various departments 
of secular life and labor." Like the melan- 
choly prophet of Judah's shadowed days, 
Ruskin was "valiant for truth." For over 
twenty years he was preeminently a critic of 
art. But he was no dilettante defender of 
that pictorial putrescence which is sometimes 
foisted upon a gullible public by depraved 
purveyors of vileness which they miscall art. 
Ruskin was the unfailing champion of the 
things which are honest and just and pure 
and lovely and of good report. His dominant 

7 



8 JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 

concern was with the mighty truths of human 
nature upon which the laws of both art and 
hfe are based. In one of his key sentences he 
tells us "that the manual arts are as accurate 
exponents of ethical states as other modes of 
expression: first, with absolute precision, of 
that of the workman, and then with pre- 
cision disguised by many distorting influences, 
of that of the nation to which it belongs." 

In the gospel according to Ruskin, we are 
taught that there can be no real beauty which 
does not emanate from beauty of soul. The 
character of a people is both the cause and 
result of its art. By their fruits ye shall know 
them. A noble art can exist only as the fruit 
of a noble soul. It cannot be produced by a 
besotted, materialized, shriveled-souled people. 
Neither is art without its reaction upon life. 
Ruskin's father would not allow his son to 
look at an impure or careless painting. If a 
people are compelled to live in constant con- 
tact with that which is common and vile, the 
very warp and woof of their lives is bound 
to be coarsened. A real interpreter of art 
must be an interpreter of life as well. Ruskin 
as he battled for purity and sincerity in paint- 
ing and sculpture and architecture, was fight- 
ing a good fight for noble ideals of thought 
and action. "Be a good man," says Carlyle, 



JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 9 

"and there'll be one rascal less." Ruskin 
again and again teaches the same lesson. 
Whatever his theme, before he is through 
with it he is sure to make it a discussion of 
the conduct of life. 

In Traffic he says: "The first, and last, and 
closest trial question to any living creature is, 
'What do you like?' Tell me what you like 
and I'll tell you what you are. Go out into 
the street and ask the first man or woman you 
meet what their taste is; and if they answer 
candidly, you know them, body and soul." 
He most strenuously objected to being regarded 
as a "respectable architectural man-milliner," 
dispensing the latest information as to the 
"newest and sweetest thing in pinnacles." 
This great prophet of reality was not satisfied 
with mere doing of the right, but he insisted 
on the necessity of loving the right. ^ His 
Scottish mother had so indoctrinated him with 
the spirit of the New Testament that he well 
understood that there is that which goes be- 
yond verbose piety and Pharisaic legalism. 
He never failed to emphasize the dominance of 
the inner life. He knew that above all else 
the cup must be pure within. He writes: 
"Would you paint a great picture? be a good 
man. Would you carve a perfect statue? 
be a pure man. Would you enact a wise law? 



10 JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 

be a just man." But Ruskin was no effete 
preacher of a nebulous ethical culture. He 
is quoted as saying that his life was dedicated 
not to "the study of the beautiful in face or 
flower, in landscape or gallery, but to an inter- 
pretation of the truth and beauty of Jesus 
Christ." 

But when Ruskin was about forty years of 
age he saw a new vision. He had been grow- 
ing more and more sensitive to the hammer 
blows struck by Carlyle in Sartor Resartus, 
in Chartism and Past and Present. In all of 
his efforts to secure practical application of 
his art teaching, he was impeded by unjust 
and revolting social and industrial conditions. 
England, full of wealth, with its multifarious 
produce, with supply for every human want, 
was, as has been said with tragic truth, "dying 
of inanition." Two million of her workers, 
"the cunningest, the strongest, and the will- 
ingest our earth ever had," sat in workhouses 
and in the poor-law prisons. In counties of 
which the green fields were dotted with herds 
and flocks, the farm laborer did not taste 
meat from one year to another. On many a 
night there set out from London a vehicle 
loaded to the breaking point with "two-legged 
live stock": London foundlings being disposed 
by contract to employers of labor in northern 



JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 11 

factories. In the mines miserable women, 
naked to the waist, crawled through narrow 
passages drawing after them cars laden with 
coal. On the one hand was a careless, blatant, 
vulgar luxury and on the other a sullen, hope- 
less, defiant poverty. "It is no time for the 
idleness of metaphysics or the entertainment 
of the arts," said Ruskin. 

His ever-deepening conviction that the very 
fountains of English life were impure impelled 
him to turn his back upon the fields in which 
he had labored with joy and honor to become 
a veritable voice crying in the wilderness. 
Unto This Last, the work which marks his 
transition, first appeared in the Cornhill Mag- 
azine. These papers were a stone thrown into 
the standing pool of contemporary economic 
thought. Political economy had indeed be- 
come the "dismal science." It was committing 
the cardinal sin of substituting logic for life. 
In the minds of many the conclusions of the 
"Manchester School" were the law delivered 
once for all. Ruskin's onslaught against 
economic orthodoxy won for him the excoria- 
tions of thousands. He exchanged laudation 
for obloquy. The articles were unpopular to 
such an extent that Thackeray, at that time 
editor of the Cornhill, was compelled to limit 
the projected series to four articles. Ruskin's 



12 JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 

"rattle-brained radicalism" consisted merely in 
trying to apply the teachings of Christianity to 
the industrial conditions of his own day. It 
is altogether possible that he was sometimes 
profoundly mistaken. He was, moreover, ex- 
treme in many of his statements. The ability 
to coo as gently as a dove was not a 
notable characteristic of Ruskin. But as we 
read Unto This Last to-day and view its 
teachings from the vantage ground of another 
generation, it is difficult for us to understand 
why its teachings were received with so many 
"showers of oil of vitriol." 

For John Ruskin the die had been cast. 
Henceforth he was, lils:e the knights of other 
days, to give his life to redressing human 
wrong. The interpreter of art had become a 
social reformer. This change of viewpoint had 
a most marked influence upon his literary 
style. He deliberately pruned the overrich 
eloquence of his earlier days; with little loss of 
its pristine beauty it became more concise, 
well-knit, and muscular. As the years passed 
by he preached with ever intenser vehemence 
and skill. To that which had been but a 
thunderous roar in Carlyle he gave precision, 
reality, and convicting power. There is a 
danger which not all writers about him have 
avoided: of fixing too great a gulf between the 



JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 13 

two phases of Ruskin's literary life. It must 
be remembered that in the years when he was 
distinctively an art critic he was also a prophet 
of social betterment, and also that in the 
latter part of his life he delivered some of his 
most luminous lectures on art. 

If Ruskin had simply said that it was wrong 
for a man of superior strength to strangle his 
weaker neighbor out of hate for him, every- 
body would have agreed. But he went further 
and contended that it was just as sinful for 
an individual of superior shrewdness to take 
advantage of some less gifted brother. It is 
to be most earnestly hoped that such teaching 
would not be found revolutionary to-day either 
in England or in America. A reading of the 
history of our own country in the decades 
immediately following the Civil War, when it 
seemed as though many of our national leaders 
were willing to lower their ethical standards 
in order to fill their coffers, impresses upon us 
the fact that within the last twenty years we 
have passed through a renaissance of righteous- 
ness. To the modern man of our generation 
the social message of Ruskin is not especially 
startling. "The survival of the fittest" is not 
the law of an industrialism which is Chris- 
tian. Ruskin says: "You would be indignant 
if you saw a strong man walk into a theater 



14 JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 

or lecture room and calmly choose the best 
place, take his feeble neighbor by the shoulder 
and turn him out of it into the back seats or 
the street. You would be equally indignant 
if you saw a stout fellow thrust himself up to 
a table where some hungry children were being 
fed and reach his arm over their heads and 
take the bread from them. But you are not 
the least indignant if, when a man has stout- 
ness of thought and swiftness of capacity, and 
instead of being long-armed only has the 
much greater gift of being long-headed, you 
think it perfectly just that he should use his 
intellect to take the bread out of the mouths 
of all the other men in the town who are in 
the same trade with him; or use his breadth 
of sweep and sight to gather some branch of 
the commerce of the country into one great 
cobweb of which he is himself to be the central 
spider, making every thread vibrate with the 
points of his claws, commanding every avenue 
with the facets of his eyes. You see no in- 
justice in this." 

Strength is never an excuse for tyranny. 
"We that are strong ought to bear the infir- 
mities of the weak," said the great apostle to 
the Gentiles. There are times when unre- 
strained competition may be nothing more or 
less than flagrant robbery. Christianity is pre- 



JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 15 

eminently social. In Sur la Propriete, by 
Emile de Laveleye, the author gives expression 
to this significant thought: "There is a social 
order which is the best. Necessarily it is not 
always the present order. Else why should we 
seek to change the latter? But it is that order 
which ought to exist to realize the greatest 
good for humanity. God knows it and wills 
it. It is for man to discover and establish it." 
Ruskin was one of the pioneers in the search 
for the best social order. Many have fol- 
lowed in his footsteps. The splendid literature, 
prophetic of an era of brotherhood and 
justice given to us by forward-looking lead- 
ers of modern thought, belongs to the heritage 
which has come to our generation from John 
Ruskin, preacher of social righteousness and 
justice. 

Ruskin had no language too scathing with 
which to denounce the nominal religion of 
materialized men and women. In his day, as 
in ours, ecclesiasticism and religion were not 
always synonymous terms. There were those 
who sat in high seats in the temples who wor- 
shiped not God but the "Goddess of Get- 
ting-on," or "Britannia of the Market." Again 
and again with consummate eloquence and un- 
restrained irony he denounced that miscalled 
Christianity which expressed itself in barren 



16 JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 

formalism or in a succession of emotions unre- 
lated to actual living. He emphasized the old 
truth, "No man can serve two masters." A 
man cannot endure as seeing Him who is 
invisible and at the same time bow before the 
golden shrine of the "Goddess of Getting-on." 
Christianity is not something remote from life. 
It is that which can permeate, transform, and 
glorify every sphere and every task. A cer- 
tain English lord is quoted as saying, "I respect 
Christianity as much as any man, but I object 
when they try to make it interfere with a 
man's private life." In his book New Worlds 
for Old, H. G. Wells tells of a transaction by 
which the capital of a railroad was swollen from 
forty million to nearly one hundred and twenty- 
three millions to cover an expenditure in im- 
provements of twenty-two and a half millions. 
It is unfortunately often the case that finan- 
ciers who mulct the public in this fashion 
are members of orthodox communion, and make 
a point of being regarded as religious. Ruskin 
objected to formal piety being a cloak for 
predatory industrialism. In The Crown of 
Wild Olives we find this sentence, striking in 
its simple truth: "The one Divine work — the 
one ordered sacrifice — is to do justice." 

Ruskin was not a socialist, although many of 
the ideas of modern socialism have sprung 



JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 17 

from seed which he planted. We must also 
admit that he was not entirely successful in 
his efifort to apply his social teaching to the 
life of his generation. Yet it must be remem- 
bered that seldom indeed do the prophet and 
the executive dwell in the same tenement of 
clay. We have no particular reason for be- 
lieving that Amos of Tekoa would have been 
the ideal man to organize a new social sys- 
tem; we find it slightly difficult to picture John 
the Baptist in the guise of an ecclesiastical 
organizer. Ruskin was an artist and a preacher 
and not an administrator. Of him it can be 
said as of the parish priest in Chaucer's Can- 
terbury Tales: 

"But Cristes lore, and his apostles twelve. 
He taughte, but first he folwed it him-selve." 

Carlyle and Spencer, in the seclusion of their 
libraries, talked most passionately, and often 
most wisely, about the regeneration of modern 
society. They lived laborious, strenuous, silent, 
useful lives, but they never stirred one finger 
to change the conditions against which they 
fulminated. No one blames them; they had 
other work. But Ruskin, by far the most 
productive of our modern English writers, 
toiled "like a curate or missionary in some 
crowded parish," caring for the bodies, the 



18 JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 

minds, and the souls of his weaker brethren. 
Frederic Harrison has well said, "The first life 
of John Ruskin was the life of a consummate 
teacher of art and master of style; the second 
life was the life of priest and evangelist." 

Unlike certain modern preachers of the social 
gospel, Ruskin did not minimize individual 
righteousness. In valiant, hard-hitting English 
he denounces the godlessness of a people of 
jaded moral sense. His sarcastic version of 
the Ten Commandments is a veritable philippic 
against subtle hypocrisy: 

"Thou shalt have gods of self and ease and 
pleasure before me. Thou shalt worship thine 
own imaginations as to house and goods and 
business, and bow down and serve them. 
Thou shalt remember the Sabbath day, to see 
to it that all its hours are given to sloth and 
lounging and stuffing the body with rich foods, 
leaving the children of sorrow and ignorance 
to perish in their sodden misfortune. Thou 
shalt kill and slay men by doing as little as 
possible thyself, and squeezing as much as 
possible out of others. Thou shalt look upon 
loveliness in womanhood to soil it with im- 
purity. Thou shalt steal daily; the employer 
from the servant and the servant from the 
employer, and the devil take the hindmost. 
Thou shalt get thy livelihood by weaving a 



JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 19 

great web of falsehoods and sheathing thyself 
in lies. Thou shalt covet thy neighbor's house 
to possess it for thyself; thou shalt covet his 
office and his farm, his goods and his fame, 
and everything that is his. And to crown all 
these laws the devil has added a new command- 
ment — thou shalt hate thy neighbor as thou 
dost hate thyself." 

Ruskin, above all else, endeavored to avoid 
expressing banal nothingness in eloquent lan- 
guage. He was mostly exceedingly concrete in 
his denunciations of evil doing. As he grew 
older he was dominated more and more by a 
sense of wrongs to be righted. The thought 
that in the midst of sorrow, suffering, wretched- 
ness, and sin those whose talents and oppor- 
tunities should have made them the real lead- 
ers of their people, were giving their days to 
game-preserving and to vapid society made 
him grow bitter. To him sin was no empty 
abstraction. His very soul was thrilled by 
what Carlyle called "a divine rage against 
falsity." His stern words like a flame of fire 
descended upon grossness, luxury, and mam- 
monism. With something of the spirit and 
power of the Hebrew prophets he stood for 
duty rather than privilege, character rather 
than possession, and ideals rather than ma- 
terials. He knew that a transformed society 



20 JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 

could consist only of regenerated men and 
women. He knew of the battles between the 
powers of light and the powers of darkness 
which are fought in every human heart. 
"Every faculty of man's soul, and every in- 
stinct of it by which he is meant to live, is 
exposed to its own special form of corruption: 
and whether within man, or in the external 
world, there is a power or condition of tempta- 
tion which is perpetually endeavoring to reduce 
every glory of his soul, and every power of 
his life, to such corruption as is possible to 
them." Much as he stressed social better- 
ment, he realized that it is futile without 
individual salvation. The truth, "Man is more 
than meat," stands at the very heart of his 
teaching. It was borne in upon him that the 
making of human souls is the most important 
manufacture in which a nation's energies could 
be engaged. He hoped to rouse England to 
a sense of her failure and to cause her to put 
first things first. He said, "In some far-away 
and yet undreamt-of hour I can imagine that 
England may cast all thoughts of possessive 
wealth back to the barbaric nations among 
whom they first arose; and that while the 
sands of the Indus and the adamant of Gol- 
conda may yet stiffen the housings of a charger 
and flash from the turbans of a slave, she, as 



JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 21 

a Christian mother, may at last be able to 
attain the virtues of a heathen one and be 
able to lead forth her sons saying, 'These are 
My Jewels.' " 

It is much easier to find in the writings of 
Ruskin eloquent, helpful, soul-stirring, ideal- 
kindling sermons than it is to find the out- 
lines of his theology. He was far from being 
a systematic thinker. It is hard to compress 
into stern syllogisms the fine frenzy of the 
poet. Until he was forty years of age his 
theology was the softened Calvinism which he 
inherited from his parents. He was in Oxford 
in the days of the Tractarian movement, but 
was absolutely untouched by it. He was al- 
ways more interested in conclusions than he 
was in the processes by which they were 
attained. But about 1860 he became very 
much unsettled in regard to the thought 
foundations of his religious life. Had this 
inevitable readjustment come earlier, it would 
have been much less painful. To analyze his 
later theology would be diflScult. But we do 
know that he became fired with an even 
greater passion for righteousness and justice. 
His love of good became more fervent and his 
hatred of evil more intense. With even greater 
frequency he recurred to Christ and his teach- 
ings. In the introduction to his Notes on the 



22 JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 

Construction of Sheepfolds he remarks, "Many- 
persons will probably find fault with me for 
publishing opinions which are not new; but 
I shall bear the blame contentedly believing 
that opinions on this subject could hardly be 
just if they were not eighteen hundred years 
old." His theology, unsystematic as it may be, 
is distinctively Christocentric. 

Few writers quote the Bible so frequently 
or so effectively. Some of his noblest passages 
are almost biblical paraphrases. The last 
paragraph of the second paper of Sesame and 
Lilies is a notable example of this. In Praeterita 
he gives a list of the chapters which his mother 
with the greatest exactness compelled him to 
memorize. He says that in this way his 
mother "established my soul in life," and adds 
the following comment: "And truly, though I 
have picked up the elements of a little further 
knowledge — in mathematics, meteorology, and 
the like, in after life — and owe not a little to 
the teaching of many people, this maternal 
installation of my mind in the property of 
chapters, I count very confidently the most 
precious, and, on the whole, the one essential 
part of all my education." To say the least, 
such a statement is not without profound 
pedagogical significance. It, moreover, helps us 
to understand the dominating forces in the 



JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 23 

life and writings of Ruskin. He was most 
emphatically a biblical preacher. 

He has been criticized for his unrestrained 
language of denunciation. He speaks of 
London, the home of Chaucer and Milton, the 
city which Johnson loved and Turner painted, 
as "that great foul city, rattling, growling, 
smoking, stinking, a ghastly heap of fermenting 
brickwork, pouring out poison at every pore." 
In common with Carlyle, Ruskin, it must be 
admitted, excelled in the richness of his vo- 
cabulary of vituperation But in the Book 
which Ruskin knew above all others we find 
that the major and minor prophets spoke words 
of undiluted strength, and that Peter and 
Paul were not afraid to speak out. Then, 
too, there was One greater than prophet or 
apostle who denounced the formalistic, hypo- 
critical scribes and Pharisees in words so fraught 
with fury that language almost breaks down 
beneath their weight. To hate wrong is the 
mark of a real Christian. A man tremendously 
in earnest in the presence of "ignorance, ani- 
mality, and brutemindedness" does not keep 
silent or speak in accents of cowardly mild- 
ness. In no age does the prophet of the living 
God quail before enthroned evil. 

The heart of John Ruskin was strangely 
warmed within him. Few men have been so 



24 JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 

impressed with the high seriousness of life. 
He believed that the issues of life and death 
depended upon the gospel. "Precious indeed 
those thirty minutes by which the teacher 
tries to get at the separate hearts of a thousand 
men, to convince them of all their weaknesses, 
to shame them for all their sin, to warn them 
of all their dangers, to try them by this way 
and that, to stir the hard fastenings of the 
doors where the Master himself has stood and 
knocked, yet none opened, and to call at the 
openings of those dark streets where Wisdom 
herself hath stretched forth her hands and no 
man regarded. Thirty minutes to raise the 
dead in." Nowhere do we find a better sum- 
mary of what for over half a century, mis- 
understood, assailed, ridiculed, and thwarted, 
John Ruskin tried to do. He was a preacher 
of the life abundant, a soldier beneath the 
ensign of the King of kings. 



n 

JONATHAN EDWARDS 

Most great men live in the future, but 
Jonathan Edwards was the child of the past. 
Most emphatically he was not one of the great 
radicals who overthrow long-entrenched sys- 
tems and lay new foundations upon which 
after generations can build. On the contrary, 
he used his transcendent genius in a vain 
attempt to revitalize a dead philosophy and a 
fast-dying creed. But in spite of this, by the 
dominating force of a mighty intellect, he 
towers to-day, among our American thinkers, 
like a colossus. 

In the early days of the New England 
theocracy the clergy were the lords of the land. 
The New England parson in his black Geneva 
cloak and close-fitting black velvet cap was an 
autocrat of the autocrats. He ruled his little 
world with a scepter of iron. From the high 
pulpit in the cold and cheerless meetinghouse 
he preached the militant, unyielding gospel of 
John Knox and John Calvin with an almost 
oracular authority. Woe to the unlucky wight 

25 



26 JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 

who dared to criticize the Lord's anointed. 
His tongue was in danger of a cleft stick. In 
church and state the preacher reigned supreme. 
But Edwards, born in 1703, came into the 
world just in time to see, as a young man, 
the Mathers, son and father, fight their last 
losing battle for the old faith and the old 
theocracy. It would not be altogether amiss 
to say that Jonathan Edwards was the suc- 
cessor of Cotton Mather as the champion of 
the iron-clad Calvinism of an earlier day. 

Dr. O. W. Holmes used to refer to himself 
as a "Brahman of the Brahmans." Edwards 
also could boast of a priestly ancestry. His 
father, Timothy Edwards, was for sixty years 
minister of the East Parish of Windsor, Con- 
necticut, and his maternal grandfather, Sol- 
omon Stoddard, of Northampton, was one of 
the ecclesiastical giants of his day. Perhaps 
it is not altogether an unmixed evil that the 
usual anecdotes, both real and fabulous, of 
Edwards's youthful days are lacking. All 
signs, however, point to extraordinary intel- 
lectual precocity. At the age of twelve he 
wrote a letter refuting with some skill the 
idea of the materiality of the soul. The same 
year he produced an elaborate account of the 
habits of the spider based on his own observa- 
tion. At thirteen he entered Yale College, 



JONATHAN EDWARDS 27 

which had been founded about fifteen years 
before. In speaking of the foundation of this 
ancient New England institution President 
Hadley says: "Yale College was founded after 
a fashion, at the beginning of the eighteenth 
century along the north shore of Long Island 
Sound. For many years it was difficult to say 
what it was and where it belonged." During 
Edwards's college days his Alma Mater was 
somewhat of a pilgrim and a stranger on the 
face of the earth, moving from one town to 
another every year or so. But such as the 
college was, Edwards followed it faithfully and 
remained with it two years as a special student 
after he received his first degree in 1719. And, 
in addition, for two years (1724-1726) he 
was a tutor at Yale and, according to Dr. 
Stiles, was one of the "pillar" tutors. We 
read elsewhere that he filled and sustained 
his office with great ability, dignity, and 
honor. 

As we turn the meager pages which tell of 
his earlier years we sometimes feel a human 
curiosity to know more. Was he ever a real 
boy when he ought to have been such, or 
was he simply a miniature old man.'^ What 
had he in common with the rollicking student 
of to-day? Was his soul so warped by a harsh 
theology and his mind so debauched with 



28 JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 

intellectuality that his sympathies were narrow 
and his life cabined, cribbed, confined? Some- 
times we are inclined to give one answer and 
sometimes another, but at the best we can 
do little more than idly speculate. In regard 
to the inner life of Jonathan Edwards, however, 
we do not have to grope long in darkness, 
and when we know the facts of a man's soul- 
life we cannot but know what manner of a 
man he was among his fellows. 

We read in his diary these significant words: 
"On Jan. 12, 1723, I made a solemn dedication 
of myself to God and wrote it down, giving 
up myself and all that I had to God, to be for 
the future in no respect my own; to act as 
one that had no right to himself in any respect 
and solemnly vowed to take God for my whole 
portion and fehcity, looking on nothing else 
as any part of my happiness, nor acting as if 
it were; and his law for the constant rule of 
my obedience, engaging to fight with all my 
might against the world, the flesh, and the 
devil, to the end of my life." Nor was he 
content with a devotion to simply theological 
abstractions. He made resolution after resolu- 
tion affecting every phase of his life. His 
writings during the Yale period show him to 
be a high-minded young man fighting, as 
many a youth has done, the old battle between 



JONATHAN EDWARDS 29 

the promptings of his heart and the teachings 
of the faith of his fathers. As we read his 
resolutions we see that one of his incentives 
for piety was the not particularly noble thought 
of the advantages which it would win for 
him in the next world. The ascetic tendency 
which was such a dominant characteristic of 
New England life finds full expression in his 
earlier writing. Some of his resolutions for 
self-mortification could have been written by 
a Saint Simeon Stylites. These characteristics 
in the young New Englander are not hard to 
explain in the light of his environment, but 
other phases of his intellectual life have proved 
almost inexplicable to his biographers. 

Now and then we find in his early writings 
paragraphs which could have well been written 
by the "God-intoxicated" Spinoza. There is 
little in common between the teachings of 
the inspired Hebrew and the harsh Augustinian 
Calvinism with which Edwards had been in- 
doctrinated from his earliest youth. The fact 
that Edwards, who had never read Spinoza, 
was able to strike such a deep philosophical 
note is additional evidence of the transcendent 
genius of this wonderful boy. Yet Spinoza 
was not the philosopher with whom Edwards 
had the most in common. The writings of 
his early twenties are strongly tinctured with 



30 JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 

Berkeley an idealism. As to whether he had 
ever read the works of the English philosopher 
has long been a mooted question. But within 
recent years the best authorities have lent the 
weight of their influence to the negative side. 
Consequently, if we accept their dictums, we 
have another illustration of the marked original- 
ity which characterized Edwards in the days 
of his young manhood. Nevertheless, it matters 
little whether or not he read Berkeley. At 
this period of his life he showed a depth of 
insight which makes us wonder what his con- 
tribution to the world of thought would have 
been had he devoted his life to philosophy. 
Yet even then he was preeminently not a 
metaphysician but a theologian. Years after- 
ward, in speaking of the intellectual and 
spiritual battles of these days, he said: "From 
my childhood up my mind had been full of 
objections against the doctrine of God's sov- 
ereignty in choosing whom he would to eternal 
life and rejecting whom he pleased, leaving 
them eternally to perish and be everlastingly 
tormented in hell. It used to appear like a 
horrible doctrine to me. I remember the time 
very well when I seemed to be convinced and 
fully satisfied as to this sovereignty of God, 
and his justice in thus eternally disposing of 
men according to his sovereign pleasure, but 



JONATHAN EDWARDS 31 

never could give an account how or by what 
means I was thus convinced, not in the least 
imagining at the time, nor a long time after, 
that there was any extraordinary influence of 
God's Spirit in it, but only that now I saw 
further, and my mind apprehended the justice 
and reasonableness of it. However, my mind 
rested in it, and it put an end to all these cavils 
and questioning." In speaking of these words 
Dr. Allen says: "So Edwards entered into the 
heritage of his fathers and made the Puritan 
consciousness his own. There are traces of 
an inward rebellion which was suppressed. 
There is reason to believe that his success 
was not so complete as he fancied in eradi- 
cating his earlier thought. But the criti- 
cal point of the transition is not explained. 
It is buried out of sight in silence and 
darkness." 

From this time forth Jonathan Edwards 
stood in the front ranks of the champions of 
the old New England theology. In 1727 he 
was ordained at Northampton as copastor with 
his distinguished grandfather, the Rev Solomon 
Stoddard. To the work of this parish, where he 
remained for twenty-three years, he gave the 
best of his life. He was anything but a lazy 
preacher. He was extremely conscientious in 
the performance of his parish duties, and he 



32 JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 

made it a point to spend thirteen hours a day 
in his study. His solitary walks and rides 
were his sole diversion. Even then the busy 
mind did not rest. He often came home from 
his journeys with his coat decorated with small 
pieces of paper on which he had written the 
thoughts which had come to him while away 
from his study. 

He was never a popular preacher in the 
ordinary sense of the word. His sermons are, 
of course, limited by the arbitrary homiletical 
divisions of his day. They are most appall- 
ingly logical and, to put it very mildly, their 
theology does not attract the twentieth-cen- 
tury reader. Yet the fire of life and reality 
still burns in them. His most widely heralded 
sermon is his famous fire-and-brimstone pro- 
duction, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry 
God." But, contrary to the generally accepted 
belief, this is not one of his characteristic 
productions. He was not a brazen-lunged 
Boanerges thundering forth edicts of terror 
against a lost world. Neither the man nor the 
preacher can be judged by his theology. His 
latest biographer says, "He was at his best 
and greatest, most original and creative when 
he described the divine love." He was a poet 
as well as a theologian. In one of his sermons 
we read: "When we behold the fragrant rose 



JONATHAN EDWARDS 33 

and lily, we see His love and purity. So the 
green trees and fields and singing of birds are 
the emanations of His infinite joy and benig- 
nity. The loveliness and naturalness of trees 
and vines are shadows of His beauty and 
loveliness." His favorite text was, "I am the 
Rose of Sharon and the Lily of the Valley," 
and his favorite words were "sweet and 
bright." 

New England asceticism did not mean 
celibacy. A few months after his ordination 
Edwards brought to Northampton as his bride 
the beautiful and saintly Sarah Pierpont. 
Several years before, about her, he had written 
the following memorable passage: 

"They say that there is a young lady in 
New Haven who is beloved of that great Being 
who made and rules the world and that there 
are certain seasons in which this great Being, 
in some way or other invisible, comes to her 
and fills her mind with exceeding sweet delight, 
and that she hardly cares for anything except 
to meditate on him; that she expects after a 
while to be received up where he is, to be 
raised up out of the world and caught up into 
heaven, being assured that he loves her too 
well to let her remain at a distance from him 
always. She will sometimes go about from 
place to place singing sweetly; and seems to 



34 JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 

be always full of joy and pleasure, and no one 
knows for what. She loves to be alone, walk- 
ing in the fields and groves and seems to have 
some one invisible always conversing with 
her." Mrs. Edwards proved a real helpmeet 
to her husband and as his reputation spread 
throughout the colony her name was always 
associated with his. Of her an old writer says: 
"She paid a becoming deference to her husband; 
she spared no pains in conforming to his in- 
clinations and rendering everything in the 
family agreeable and pleasant, accounting it 
her greatest glory, and that wherein she could 
best serve God and her generation, to be the 
means in this way of promoting his usefulness 
and happiness. And no person of discern- 
ment could be conversant in the family with- 
out observing and admiring the perfect har- 
mony, the mutual love and esteem that 
subsisted between them.'* In some ways the 
world was not very kind to Edwards. There 
were times when poverty and persecution 
seemed to be his only reward. Believing as 
he did, he could not help thinking that he 
had fallen upon evil days. Yet we cannot 
help feeling glad that for him the tragedy of 
existence was relieved by a beautiful home 
life and the presence of one able and willing 
to help bear his burdens. 



JONATHAN EDWARDS 35 

"In the church of the wilderness Edwards wrought. 
Shaping his creed at the forge of thought; 
And with Thor's own hammer welded and bent 
The iron links of his argument, 
Which strove to grasp in its mighty span 
The purpose of God and the fate of man! 
Yet faithful stiU in his daily round 
To the weak and the poor and sin-sick found. 
The schoolman's lore and the casuist art 
Drew warmth and life from his fervent heart. 
Had he not seen in the solitudes 
Of his deep and dark Northampton woods 
A vision of love about him fall? 
Not the blinding splendor which fell on Saul, 
But the tenderer glory that rests on them 
Who walk in the New Jerusalem; 
Where never the sun or moon are known 
But the Lord and his love are the light alone! 
And watching the sweet, still countenance 
Of the wife of his bosom rapt in trance. 
Had he not treasured each broken word 
Of the mystical wonder seen and heard; 
And loved the beautiful dreamer more 
That thus to the desert of earth she bore 
Clusters of Eshcol from Canaan's shore?" 

Independently of his personal renown the 
ministry of Edwards in the beautiful old New 
England town of Northampton occupies an 
important place in the ecclesiastical history of 
New England on account of the mighty re- 
vival, known as "The Great Awakening," 
which visited the parish in 1741. It was in 



36 JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 

this movement that the New England Cal- 
vinist was associated with WhiteJSeld, the 
golden-mouthed Chrysostom of the eighteenth 
century. Much has been written in regard 
to "The Great Awakening," particularly in 
reference to the excesses which characterized it. 
There is, however, ample evidence to prove 
that all of the influences of this revival were 
not negative. Beyond the peradventure of a 
doubt it "revitalized the dying orthodoxy of 
New England and turned the minds of many 
from the things that are of the earth to the 
eternal verities." 

In some quarters nevertheless Edwards was 
severely criticized for some of the methods which 
he used during the great spiritual upheaval. 
He was blamed for "frightening poor, innocent 
little children with talk of hell-fire and damna- 
tion." And no matter how sympathetic our 
attitude, we must admit that some of his 
writings lend color to such accusations. In 
speaking of children he says, "They are young 
vipers, and are infinitely more hateful than 
vipers, and are in a most miserable condition 
as well as grown persons; and they are naturally 
very senseless and stupid, being born as the 
wild ass's colt, and need much to awaken 
them." This they doubtless got, for we have 
ample evidence that the doctrine of fire-and- 



JONATHAN EDWARDS 37 

brimstone was an important phase of Edwards's 
theology. Here it might not be amiss to quote 
from his best-known sermon, "Sinners in the 
Hands of an Angry God": "The God that holds 
you over the pit of hell, much as one holds 
a spider or some loathsome insect over the 
fire, abhors you and is dreadfully provoked; 
his wrath toward you burns like fire; he looks 
upon you as worthy of nothing else but to be 
cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to 
bear to have you in his sight; you are ten 
thousand times more abominable in his eyes 
than the most hateful venomous serpent is in 
ours. sinner! consider the fearful danger 
you are in: it is a great furnace of wrath, a 
wide bottomless pit, full of fire of wrath that 
you are held over in the hand of that God, 
whose wrath is provoked and incensed as much 
against you as against many of the damned 
in hell. You hang by a slender thread with 
the flames of divine wrath flashing about it, 
and ready to singe it and burn it asunder." 
Recourse to the sermons of the shepherd of 
the Northampton flock show that at this 
period the people of that village were very 
frequently regaled with pabulum of this kind. 
We could possibly find here an explanation 
of some of the indisputable evils which fol- 
lowed "The Great Awakening." 



38 JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 

But within a couple of years the village 
resumed its ordinary tranquillity. Later, how- 
ever, a bitter church war between priest and 
people burst with almost unrestrained fury 
upon the little parish. To-day the village of 
Northampton is most heartily ashamed of its 
ungenerous treatment of the most distinguished 
man who ever dwelt within its borders. There 
is something nevertheless to be said on their 
side of the question. One of Edwards's ad- 
miring biographers speaks of him as "thorough 
in the government of his children." Sir Leslie 
Stephen says: "He adopted the plan, less 
popular now than then, and even more de- 
cayed in America than in England, of 'thor- 
oughly subduing' his children as soon as they 
showed any tendency to self-will. He was a 
*great enemy' to all Vain amusements,' and 
even after his children had grown up he en- 
forced their abstinence from such 'pernicious 
practice' and never allowed them to be out 
after nine at night. Any gentleman, we are 
happy to add, was given proper opportunities 
for courting his daughters after consulting 
their parents, but on condition of conforming 
strictly to the family regulations. This Puri- 
tan discipline appears to have succeeded with 
Edwards's own family; but a gentleman with 
'flacid solids, rapid fluids,' and a fervent be- 



JONATHAN EDWARDS 39 

lief in hell-fire is seldom appreciated by the 
youth even of a Puritan village."^ 

Edwards brought charges against a number 
of prominent young people of his congregation, 
accusing them of reading improper literature, 
very probably Richardson's Pamela. These 
accusations, involving practically all of the 
prominent families in the community, set the 
town in a blaze. At the same time a more 
serious battle was being waged as to who 
was eligible for admission to the Lord's Supper. 
To enter at length at this time into the in- 
tricacies of a church quarrel in a New England 
village in the middle of the eighteenth cen- 
tury would not be particularly edifying. We 
shall content ourselves with chronicling the 
result. Edwards was dismissed from his par- 
ish by a majority of more than two hundred 
to twenty, "a martyr to his severe sense of 
discipline." Thus at the age of forty-seven 
he found himself, with no means and a large 
family, turned adrift. It takes the night to 
bring out the stars; it takes adversity to bring 
out the best that is in a man. In his hour 
of darkness the frail, persecuted preacher never 
looked back but boldly set out to make the 
best of things as they were. Friends came to 
his aid; there were several pulpits ready to 

' Printed by permission of G. P. Putnam's Sons, Publishers. 



40 JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 

accept his services; one call came from far- 
away Scotland. But for some inexplicable 
reason the position which he accepted was 
that of missionary to the Indians at Stock- 
bridge, Massachusetts. There is something 
both of the comic and the tragic in the idea 
of the great Calvinistic logician attempting to 
teach the rudiments of Christianity to the 
copper-colored children of the sun. It is 
rather hard to decide though whom we most 
pity, Edwards or the Indians. Stephen says: 
"He has remarked pathetically in one of his 
writings on the very poor prospect open to 
the Houssatunnuck Indians, if their salvation 
depended on the study of the evidence of 
Christianity. And if Edwards preached upon 
the topics of which his mind was fullest, their 
case would have been still harder. A sermon 
in the Houssatunnuck language, if Edwards 
ever acquired that tongue, upon predestina- 
tion, the dijfferences between the Arminian and 
the Calvinist schemes, liberty of indifference, 
and other such doctrines, would hardly be an 
inproving performance." 

Whatever its influence upon the lives of the 
Indians, Edwards's exile in the wilderness was 
an important period of his life. Here it was 
that he wrote his famous treatise upon the 
Freedom of the Will, which can be regarded 



JONATHAN EDWARDS 41 

as one of the literary sensations of the century. 
In regard to this essay there has been much 
darkening of council by words without knowl- 
edge. Fulsome laudation and wholesale con- 
demnation together have been its portion. 
For a couple of generations it has been the 
fashion to speak of it as a monumental work 
with whose conclusion no one agrees, but 
containing arguments which none can dispute. 
A little analysis of the work itself, however, 
conclusively proves that there is absolutely no 
need of such a cowardly surrender to Calvin- 
ism. At the outset, even taking it for granted 
that we could find no flaw in Edwards's 
logic that would not prove the correctness of 
his reasoning, it would simply be an evidence 
of our unfortunate inadeptness at the dis- 
covery of verbal chicanery. To unravel all of 
the caustical intricacies of the essay on the 
Will would simply be as profitable as the 
solving of the puzzle in the old syllogism in 
which David informs us that all men are liars. 
Life is a little bit too big to be compressed 
into a few pedantic syllogisms. 

But there is no earthly reason for assuming 
the technical correctness of the reasoning in 
this marvelous analysis of the fundamental 
doctrine of the Pilgrim Fathers. In short, 
Edwards argues that everything has a cause. 



42 JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 

that we select one thing rather than another 
because we are influenced by our strongest 
motive. The will, being determined by the 
strongest motive, is not free. In speaking of 
this argument Dr. Charles F. Richardson, of 
Dartmouth, says: "Its practical value is nil. 
Upon the thoughts, words, and deeds of life 
it exerts no effect. Before one choose A or 
B, it is true, he must make up his mind which 
to choose; having chosen, perhaps he cannot 
choose the other; at any rate, he cannot have 
chosen other than he did choose. What 
follows as to his real freedom of choice in the 
first place? Practically nothing. Can a man, 
before choosing, select A or B at will? Yes, 
unless he is a puppet, and no subtlety or 
nullification of words can make this other 
than a fact. It was by a free act that Edwards 
determined to write his treatise. Writing it 
in Stockbridge, he could not also write it 
elsewhere. And in spite of all its evident and 
potent environment, the completed volume 
was the work neither of chemical forces merely, 
nor the Fates, nor of the pen of God." 

Edwards tried to solve an unsolvable prob- 
lem. Most of us are satisfied with the dictum 
of bluff old Samuel Johnson, "We know we're 
free and that's the end of it." Man's vision 
is limited. He cannot see all sides of truth. 



JONATHAN EDWARDS 43 

It is true that 

"There's a divinity that shapes our ends. 
Rough-hew them how we will"; 

but it is also true that 

"Our wills are ours, we know not how; 
Our wills are ours, to make them thine." 

The essay on the Will is an attempt to achieve 
the impossible. We may wonder at the mag- 
nitude of the work. We may admire it for 
its dialectical skill, but at the best we can- 
not pronounce it other than a magnificent 
failure. 

The fame which Edwards won through his 
opus magnum caused him to be appointed 
president of the College of New Jersey at 
Princeton. Upon this appointment Dr. Oliver 
Wendell Holmes in his brilliant but very un- 
sympathetic essay makes the following com- 
ment: "The truth is, Edwards belonged in 
Scotland, to which he owed so much, and not 
to New England. And the best thing that 
could have happened, if it had happened early 
enough, both for him and for his people, was 
what did happen after a few years of residence 
at Stockbridge, where he went after leaving 
Northampton, namely, his transfer to the 
presidency of the College at Princeton, New 



44 JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 

Jersey, where the Scotch theological thistle has 
always flourished, native or imported — a stately 
flower at present, with fewer prickles and 
livelier bloom than in the days of Boston, the 
Ettrick Shepherd of old." Whether he was 
capable of winning for himself a place by the 
side of Witherspoon, McCosh, Wilson, and the 
other great presidents of Princeton is a question 
upon which it is idle to speculate. Less than 
a month after taking up the duties of his oflSce 
he died of smallpox and was buried in the 
little Presbyterian graveyard at Princeton by 
the side of his son-in-law and predecessor. 
Dr. Aaron Burr, in the same plot in which later 
was laid all that was mortal of another Aaron 
Burr, Edwards's grandson, who brought dis- 
honor to an honored name. 

The life of Edwards is full of contradic- 
tions. Genius is always a paradox. Attempts 
to analyze it are mostly futile. But the fact 
remains that Jonathan Edwards was great 
among the sons of men. His title among 
American thinkers will not soon be disputed. 
On a memorial tablet on the wall of the church 
of the parish from which he was once driven 
with excoriations we read these words: "The 
law of truth was in his mouth and iniquity 
was not found in his lips. He walked with 
me in peace and equity and did turn many 



JONATHAN EDWARDS 45 

away from iniquity." And he of whom the 
words can be truly said was one of the "friends 
and aiders of those who live the life of the 
Spirit." 



m 

RADIANT VIGOR 

In his strong, vivid, and inspiring poem 
"Rugby Chapel," Matthew Arnold, in speaking 
of his father. Dr. Thomas Arnold, the great 
master of Rugby, says: 

"But cold, 
Solemn, unlighted, austere 
Through this gathering darkness, arise 
The chapel walls, in whose bound 
Thou, my father, art laid. 

"There thou dost lie, in the gloom 
Of the autumn evening; but ah! 
That word 'gloom' to my mind 
Brings thee back in the light 
Of thy radiant vigor again. 
In the gloom of November we passed 
Days not dark by thy side; 
Seasons impaired not the ray 
Of thy buoyant cheerfulness clear." 

In the phrase "radiant vigor" we find 
epitomized the vital personality of the English 
schoolmaster, who to the youth of more than 
one generation was a veritable tower of strength, 
When Thomas Arnold became a candidate for 
the Headmastership of Rugby, it was pre- 

46 



RADIANT VIGOR 47 

dieted that if he were elected, "he would change 
the face of education all through the public 
schools of England." This he did not do 
through any revolutionizing of the scholar- 
ship of his day, but, rather, by the contagion 
of a powerful personality. He had vigor of 
body and vigor of soul. It must be admitted 
that in general physical vigor is the basis of 
all strength. A strong intellect is mostly 
found in a strong body. Bodily health is 
conducive to a genuine spirituality. It is 
hard for a dyspeptic to be a saint. Samuel 
Johnson once said in his blunt way, "Every 
man is a rascal when he is sick." Seldom is 
the radiant, life-giving personality found in 
the tenement of clay of an invalid. No longer 
do we believe "mortification of the flesh" to 
be an act of piety. 

"Let us not always say, 
'Spite of this flesh to-day 
I strove, made head, gained ground 
Upon the whole!' 
As the bird wings and sings 
Let us cry, 'All good things 
Are ours; nor soul helps flesh more now 
Than flesh helps soul.' " 

The body is not to be looked upon as weight 
impeding the growth of the soul but, rather, 
as its helper and ally. 



48 JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 

It cannot, however, be denied that in re- 
gard to the power of a strong body to in- 
vigorate the spirit there has been within 
recent years considerable empty verbaHzing. 
In some circles it is the fashion to quote 
the hopelessly over- worked proverb, '^Mens 
sano in corpore sano,'* as meaning that 
the possession of a sound body is incon- 
trovertible evidence of the presence of a 
sound mind. I once heard an address 
upon what the speaker called "Muscular 
Christianity." His title may have been cor- 
rect, for what he called Christianity was most 
emphatically neither intellectual nor spiritual. 
Sometimes the much-vaunted triangle of "body, 
mind, and spirit" is discussed in such a way 
as to cause the listener to believe that the 
first line of this hypothetical figure is of vastly 
more importance that the other two. But in 
spite of the callow vaporing of those who, in 
the worst sense of the phrase, possess "single- 
track" minds, health of body as a factor in 
the development of the soul must not be 
minimized. 

"Radiant vigor" is the most potent force of 
human dynamics. It is at the heart of all 
real teaching. Almost everybody who writes 
or speaks along educational lines has his own 
definition of education. Is there, however. 



RADIANT VIGOR 49 

any of these formulations which comes nearer 
to hitting the nail square on the head than 
Thomas Carlyle's scintillating apothegm, "Fire 
kindled at the fire of living fire"? Real teach- 
ing is from the living, through the Hving and 
to the living. No pedagogical course can make 
a teacher of a gerund-grinding depersonalized 
pedant. Neither can a theological seminary 
transform such an one into a real preacher 
of the living word. The radiantly vigorous 
personality is, after all, the outgrowth of a 
great soul. The man of lean soul has no power 
of inspiration. Among the great preachers of 
the last century, like a mountain in the clear, 
cold air of morning, towers the radiant figure 
of Phillips Brooks. A Japanese student at 
Harvard, after hearing him one Sunday morn- 
ing in Trinity Church, wrote: "Phillips Brooks! 
What struggling souls does he support and 
strengthen! What a depth under his surplice, 
what a broadness behind his prayer book! 
After a draught of his elixir a wayfarer marches 
on for a week or two with songs upon his lips; 
the rough earth with all its mountains and 
valleys leveled before him." More than one 
choice youth has caught new gleams of the 
vision splendid as through Dr. Allen's biog- 
raphy he comes into sympathetic contact with 
this big-souled prophet of the invisible. No 



50 JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 

man stood nearer to the life of midnineteenth- 
century America than Henry Ward Beecher. 
Eloquent, magnanimous, open-minded, sym- 
pathetic, and sincere, he spoke not alone to 
the congregation of Plymouth Church but to 
the American people. The source of this 
Herculean power lay in a personality of radiant 
charm and vigor. As George William Curtis 
once said, "How few of us can keep our balance 
when a regal soul dashes by." Character is 
not taught but caught. Human better- 
ment comes through association with the 
best. In gauging the worth of a life it can 
be truly said, "So much personality, so much 
power." 

Little is there which a man can do without 
finding his personality a help or a hindrance. 
For example, nervous, sinewy English sentences 
are never written by nonentities. The carry- 
ing power of a group of words depends upon 
the man behind them. An assumed vigor of 
expression on the part of a weakling becomes 
a shriek. The red-blooded virility of Rudyard 
Kipling is the genuine expression of the man. 
The numerous pitiful imitations of this poet 
who, at his best, belongs among the masters 
are in themselves evidences of the futility of 
trying to acquire the art of writing by be- 
ginning at the wrong end. The development of 



RADIANT VIGOR 51 

the personality is the first step in the making 
of a writer. The blundering student who 
really says something which is the outgrowth 
of his own experience has greater potentialities 
than the prim miss who has acquired the 
ability to cover several pages with faultless 
nothings. Nowhere and never can we get 
away from what we are. 

What an individual makes of himself is the 
final criterion of the success or failure of his 
life. In his somewhat raving soliloquy the 
youth in Tennyson's "Locksley Hall" curses 
among numerous other things "the gold that 
gilds the straighten'd forehead of the fool." 
Yet in the long run no amount of gilding can 
hide the real man. Education is not to be 
measured by the amount of knowledge accumu- 
lated but, rather, in terms of manhood and 
womanhood. It is not what we say or what 
we know or what we can do that counts, but 
what we are. One of the world's most com- 
prehensive truths is expressed in the words, 
"As a man thinketh in his heart so is he." 
An individual's thoughts write themselves upon 
his very person. He who in thought grovels 
in the sensual mire becomes in his aspect 
coarse and animalistic. To concern oneself 
year after year with worthless trifles makes a 
man puttering and pedantic. The virtue of 



52 JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 

economy practiced too faithfully becomes a 
vice. Thinking in terms of pennies tends to 
dwarf the mind and soul. Constant concern 
with things material extirpates the power of 
spiritual insight. Too dominant an emphasis 
upon the financial aspects of religion unspir- 
itualizes a church. The preacher who measures 
success in terms of loaves and fishes becomes 
a contemptible object. We have it on good 
authority that there is no place for the money- 
changer in the temple of Jehovah. Just as 
true to-day as when they were first uttered 
are the words of the wise man of old, "Keep 
thy heart with all diligence, for out of it are 
the issues of life." As we think, we are. 

In H. G. Wells's Mr. Britling Sees It 
Through we find an indirect tribute to Mat- 
thew Arnold when one of the characters de- 
clares that England's troubles are due to the 
fact that "we didn't listen to Matthew Arnold." 
In the writings of this Victorian prophet of 
"sweetness and light" there is at least one 
thought that America needs. Arnold laid 
special stress upon the ancient Hellenic ideal 
of self-development, which teaches that the 
highest due of man is to "augment the ex- 
cellence of his nature and make an intelligent 
being more intelligent." Some one may ob- 
ject, saying, "Is it not the duty of a Christian 



RADIANT VIGOR 53 

to do good to others?" This question most 
certainly deserves an affirmative answer, but 
before we try to make others better and to 
reform the world in general, it behooves us to 
have ourselves attained a reasonable intellectual 
and moral stature. The world cannot be re- 
formed or evangelized by bunglers. Capacity 
always comes before achievement. It is not 
alone charity that begins at home. All prog- 
ress starts with the individual. "But I am so 
anxious to save souls," a young man said to 
President Finney, of Oberlin, during an inter- 
view in which the youth was trying to justify 
his plan of entering the ministry without 
completing his education. "Young man," said 
the President, "if the Lord had wanted you to 
go to saving souls a year sooner, he'd have 
made you a year sooner." 

Sometimes we spend so much time cultivating 
our neighbor's gardens that weeds run riot in 
our own. But in the words of Thoreau the need 
is for men who are "not only good, but good 
for something." Hours used in self-improve- 
ment are sometimes spent in a more essentially 
religious way than some that were passed in 
distributing tracts. It was Matthew Arnold 
himself who spoke of Sophocles as being one 
who "saw life steadily and who saw it whole." 
In the last analysis it is the strong, well- 



54 JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 

balanced individual with this broad, clear 
perspective who carries forward the banner of 
humanity. Radiant vigor is a grace never 
attained by those who see but one aspect of 
truth. It does not fall as the gentle rain from 
heaven upon the place beneath. Like all of 
the other real attainments of life, it must be 
paid for with wisdom, tolerance, restraint, and 
effort. But it is worth the price. 

The man who has this dynamic energizing 
power is as strong as the strongest. He is a 
real leader of the host of mankind. In the 
same noble poem, inspired by his father's 
life and character, the poet in winged words 
lays his wreath of laurel upon the altar of 
the captains in the army which fights the 
battles of truth and light: 

"Then, in such hour of need 
Of your fainting, dispirited race. 
Ye, like angels, appear, 
Radiant with ardor divine! 
Beacons of hope, ye appear! 
Languor is not in your heart. 
Weakness is not in your word. 
Weariness not on your brow. 
Ye aHght in our van ! At your voice, 
Panic, despair, flee away. 
Ye move through the ranks, recall 
The stragglers, refresh the outworn, 
Praise, reinspire the brave! 



RADIANT VIGOR 55 

Order, courage return. 
Eyes kindling, and prayers. 
Follow your steps as ye go. 
Ye fill up the gaps in our files. 
Strengthen the wavering line, 
Stablish, continue our march. 
On, on to the bound of the waste, 
On, to the city of God." 



IV 

THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE OF 
WHITTIERi 

During the years in which Whittier lived 
and wrote, the hills and valleys of New England 
were resounding with the tumult and shouting 
of a long-waged ecclesiastical conflict. The 
old order was changing, yielding place to the 
new. The harsh, dogmatic, logical, positive 
Calvinism of an earlier day was inevitably 
reacting into a nebulous but militant Uni- 
tarianism. Young men in libraries were closing 
their Paleys and grappling with the intricacies 
of a Kantean transcendentalism. Still, to a 
large degree, unknown in Europe, the great- 
est book of the nineteenth century. Sartor 
Resartus, was in America finding readers 
among men of light and leading and the mighty 
message of the flaming-hearted, golden-mouthed 
prophet of Dumfries's purple moors was burn- 
ing its way into the souls of men. From the 
lecture platform Emerson was giving to in- 
quiring minds a somewhat misty and shallow 

'The selections from Whittier are used by permission of Houghton 
Mifflin Company, Publishers. 

56 



THE MESSAGE OF WHITTIER 57 

philosophy, but a vital and luminous inter- 
pretation of life. The scintillating Dr. Holmes 
with zest was tilting his shining lance against 
the monstrosities of the old Calvinism. The 
age was rife with subtle questionings. On 
every side could be heard the clash of creed 
and the babel of isms. Emerson said that the 
motto of Margaret Fuller was: "I don't know 
where I'm going. Follow me." And not a 
few of her contemporaries could have sounded 
the same slogan. 

But in the religious poetry of Whittier we 
are taken far away from the world of dogma 
and controversy. His grasp of religious truth 
is at once simple and comprehensive. His 
message is essentially spiritual rather than 
theological. The emphasis is upon the great 
elemental, fundamental truths of the life of 
the Spirit. Whittier 's muse rises with wings 
as eagle's above the smoke of the conflict. 
The devotee of any creed can find solace and 
refreshment at the Valclusa fountain of the 
genius of the Quaker poet. 

Whittier only among our great American 
poets was not a Unitarian, although the 
Unitarianism of Holmes and Longfellow was 
the expression of a revulsion from the harsh 
creed of their fathers rather than a denial of 
the deity of the Christ. To claim that he was 



58 JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 

a Unitarian is to ignore some of the sweetest 
and noblest measures in our literature. But 
the Christ whom he worshiped was not a dead 
Christ upon whose grave the silent Syrian stars 
look down. In the poem "Our Master" we 
find words which upon the wings of song have 
carried many a world-tossed, sin-burdened soul 
to the throne of God: 

"No fable old, nor mythic lore, 
Nor dream of bards and seers, 
No dead fact stranded on the shore 
Of the oblivious years; 

"But warm, sweet, tender, even yet 
A present help is He; 
And faith has still its Olivet, 
And love its Galilee. 

"The healing of his seamless dress 
Is by our beds of pain; 
We touch him in life's throng and press. 
And we are whole again. 

"Through him the first fond prayers are said 
Our lips of childhood frame. 
The last low whispers of our dead 
Are burdened with his name. 

**We faintly hear, we dimly see, 
In differing phrase we pray; 
But, dim or clear, we own in thee 
The Light, the Truth, the Way!" 

"The Meeting" is one of the great medi- 
tative poems of our literature. It has the grand 



THE MESSAGE OF WHITTIER 59 

old virtue of sincerity. Amid the perfumed 
brightness of the summer day in the plain little 
meetinghouse the farmer folk gather in silence 
to be still and know that God is God. And 
for them, towering above all others like a 
mountain in the clear, cold air of morning, 
looms one great truth: 

"... the dear Christ dwells not afar. 
The king of some remoter star. 
Listening, at times, with flattered ear 
To homage wrung from selfish fear, 
But here, amid the poor and blind. 
The bound and suffering of our kind. 
In works we do, in prayers we pray, 
Life of our life, he lives to-day." 

Through all of the warp and woof of Whit- 
tier's poetry like a golden thread runs the 
sublime thought of the "living Christ," and 
nowhere is it more nobly expressed than in 
the ringing measures of "Palestine": 

"Blest land of Judaea! thrice hallowed of song, 
Where the holiest of memories pilgrimlike throng; 
In the shade of thy palms, by the shores of thy sea. 
On the hills of thy beauty, my heart is with thee. 

"Blue sea of the hills ! in my spirit I hear 
Thy waters, Gennesaret, chime on my ear; 
Where the Lowly and Just with the people sat down. 
And thy spray on the dust of his sandals was thrown. 



60 JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 

"And what if my feet may not tread where he stood. 
Nor my ears hear the dashing of GaUlee's flood. 
Nor my eyes see the cross which he bowed him to bear. 
Nor my knees press Gethsemane's garden of prayer. 

"Yet, Loved of the Father, thy Spirit is near 
To the meek, and the lowly, and penitent here; 
And the voice of thy love is the same even now 
As at Bethany's tomb or on Olivet's brow." 

Theologically Whittier was neither a radical 
nor a reactionary. He was always anxious to 
conserve the precious heritage of other years, 
but the windows of his soul were ever open 
to new light and new truth. In the poetry of 
the gentle-spirited son of a sect which in 
earlier days the men of blood and iron of the 
old Puritan theocracy had excoriated and 
violently persecuted, we find no spirit of 
bitterness. In fact, in the verse of Whittier 
we find a tolerance for the Ironside Calvinist 
which is lacking in the works of their own 
descendants. He says, 

"Hold fast your Puritan heritage. 
But let the free thought of the age 
Its light and hope and sweetness add 
To the stern faith the fathers had." 



And again. 



'Praise and thanks for an honest man. 
Glory to God for the Puritan!" 



THE MESSAGE OF WHITTIER 61 

No man was more conscious than he that 
the Puritan, with all of his uncompromising 
harshness and his lack of sweetness and light, 
had a sense of the eternal values. Whittier 
understood this because he too endured as see- 
ing Him who is invisible. 

"Over the roofs of the pioneers 
Gathers the moss of a hundred years; 
On man and his works has passed the change 
Which needs must be in a century's range; 
The lands lie open and warm in the sun. 
Anvils clamor and millwheels run — 
Flocks on the hillsides, herds on the plain, 
The wilderness gladdened with fruit and grain! 

"Everywhere is the grasping hand, 
And eager adding of land to land; 
And earth, which seemed to the fathers meant 
But as a pilgrim's wayside tent — 
A nightly shelter to fold away 
When the Lord should call at the break of day — 
Solid and steadfast seems to be, 
And Time has forgotten Eternity ! 

"But fresh and green from the rotting roots 
Of primal forests the young growth shoots; 
From the death of the old the new proceeds. 
And the life of truth from the rot of creeds; 
On the ladder of God, which upward leads. 
The steps of progress are human needs. 
For his judgments still are a mighty deep. 
And the eyes of his providence never sleep; 
When the night is darkest he gives the morn. 
When the famine is sorest the wine and corn!" 



62 JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 

In those hours when we stand in the presence 
of the mighty mysteries, when the lamp of 
faith burns low and the specters of the mind, 
like Banquo's gory ghost, refuse to down, the 
simple and sincere faith of the New England 
poet is a veritable rock in a weary land. Whit- 
tier reaches his affirmation not by following 
the steep and rugged path of philosophical 
questioning but, rather, by merely listening to 
the promptings of the still small voice within 
his own soul. The Quaker creed of the inner 
light is but another phrasing of John Wesley's 
grand old doctrine of the "witness of the 
Spirit." But Whittier is not satisfied simply 
to believe in the existence of God. Not only 
has he faith in a God but in a good God. His 
Deity is not the Calvinistic God of stern justice 
and merciless wrath, but one who notes the 
fall of every sparrow and who, "though the 
road be dark and dreary," leads his children 

"O'er moor and fen, o'er crag and torrent, till 
The night is gone." 

The poem "The Eternal Goodness" more nearly 
than any other synthesizes Whittier's creed: 

"Yet, in the maddening maze of things, 
And tossed by flood. 
To one fixed trust my spirit clings: ' 
I know that God is good! 



THE MESSAGE OF WHITTIER 63 

"The wrong that pains my soul below 
I dare not throne above, 
I know not of his hate — I know 
His goodness and his love. 

**I know not what the future hath 
Of marvel or surprise. 
Assured alone that life and death 
His mercy underlies. 



"And so beside the Silent Sea 
I wait the muffled oar; 
No harm from him can come to me 
On ocean or on shore. 

"I know not where his islands lift 
Their frond ed palms in air; 
I only know I cannot drift 
Beyond his love and care." 

But Whittier was no futile nurse of pious 
emotions. He never tried to substitute feel- 
ing for faith or faith for works. He under- 
stood that emotion not translated into deeds is 
baneful and that faith without works is dead. 
The man who sacrificed his best years to bat- 
tling for the consummation of a great reform 
had translated his theology into human terras. 

"To Thee our full humanity, 
Its joys and pains, belong; 
The wrong of man to man on thee 
Inflicts a deeper wrong. 

"Who hates, hates thee, who loves becomes 
Therein to thee allied." 



64 JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 

His love for his fellow man was not a mere 
wishy-washy sentimentality. With Carlyle he 
believed, "When thou seest ignorance, ani- 
mality, and brute-mindedness, smite it in 
God's name." Strong and steady were the 
blows which he struck the institution of hu- 
man slavery. Paradoxical as it may seem, 
the Quaker poet was the most militant of our 
American writers. There are times when his 
words ring as the trumpet summoning to the 
fray. 

"... in God's own might 
We gird us for the coming fight. 
And strong in him whose cause is ours 
In conflict with unholy powers. 
We grasp the weapons he has given — 
The Light and Truth and Love of Heaven." 

Not one of the sturdy virtues of the Puri- 
tan was lacking in the Quaker, but in him 
there was a milder strain. He had a deeper 
sense of brotherhood and a broader spirit of 
tolerance. His religion was not so exclusively 
dominated by Old Testament ideals. Love as 
well as righteousness was in his lexicon, yet 
he was ever loyal to duty. This characteristic 
of his peculiar people is with translucent clear- 
ness mirrored forth in the poetry of Whittier. 
In the cycle, "The Tent on the Beach," one 
of the poems tells the story of "Abraham 



THE MESSAGE OF WHITTIER 65 

Davenport." It was on the famous dark 
day in May in 1780. The sky was so black 
with ominous clouds that the birds ceased to 
sing, the barnyard fowls went to roost, and 
the cattle lowed at the pasture bars and looked 
homeward. All expected to hear the doom- 
blast of the trumpet shatter the heavy sky. 
In the old State House sat the lawmakers of 
Connecticut. Some one said, "It is the Lord's 
great day," and moved adjournment. 

". . . and then, as if with one accord, 
AU eyes were turned to Abraham Davenport. 
He rose, slow cleavmg with his steady voice 
The intolerable hush. 'This well may be 
The Day of Judgment which the world awaits; 
But be it so or not, I only know 
My present duty, and my Lord's command 
To occupy till he come. So at the post 
Where he hath set me in his providence, 
I choose, for one, to meet him face to face — 
No faithless servant frightened from my task, 
But ready when the Lord of the harvest calls; 
And therefore, with all reverence, I would say. 
Let God do his work, we wiU see to ours. 
Bring in the candles.' And they brought them in. 

"And there he stands in memory to this day, 
Erect, self-poised, a rugged face, half seen 
Against the background of unnatural dark, 
A witness to the ages as they pass. 
That simple duty hath no place for fear." 



66 JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 

In an almost forgotten little poem, "The 
Friend's Burial," we find a precious tribute to 
the memory of one of whom it could be said 
as of the woman who broke the alabaster box 
of ointment at the Master's feet, "She hath 
done what she could." 

"How reverent in our midst she stood. 
Or knelt in grateful praise! 
What grace of Christian womanhood 
Was in her household ways! 

"For still her holy living meant 
No duty left undone; 
The heavenly and the human blent 
Their kindred loves in one. 



"The dear Lord's best interpreters 
Are humble human souls; 
The Gospel of a life like hers 
Is more than books or scrolls. 

"From scheme and creed the light goes out, 
The saintly fact survives; 
The blessed Master none can doubt 
Revealed in holy lives." 

"Philosophy," says Novalis, "bakes no bread, 
but gives us God, freedom, and immortality." 
The real poet too brings to the soul of man 
a more vivid consciousness of the reality of 
the invisible. In Whittier we sound not the 
depth of struggling souls, we find no burning 
desire to 



THE MESSAGE OF WHITTIER 67 

"... assert Eternal Providence 
And justify the ways of God to men," 

neither do we view as in a magic mirror the 
varied life of a great age. But we do come 
face to face with the never-dying truths 
which the "ripening experience of hfe" taught 
a dauntless and loving soul; one whose sincere 
and genuine humanity draws him humanly 
near to our hearts. To sneer at Whittier be- 
cause he has not the almost all-inclusive mes- 
sage of a Shakespeare or the superabundant 
vigor of a Browning is to give a pitiable exam- 
ple of that sophomoric sciolism which believes 
that those ideas that are easily comprehensible 
are invariably superficial. Obscurity and pro- 
fundity are not necessarily synonymous terms; 
neither is simplicity an incontrovertible evi- 
dence of shallowness. Whittier's poetic assur- 
ances of immortality are of infinitely more 
worth than many labored volumes. 

His thoughts here are those of a man who 
over doubt has gloriously triumphed. "My 
Psalm" is a poem which expresses the un- 
wavering faith of life's eventide: 

"I mourn no more my vanished years: 
Beneath a tender rain. 
An April rain of smiles and tears. 
My heart is young again. 



68 JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 

"Enough that blessings undeserved 
Have marked my erring track; 
That wheresoe'er my feet have swerved. 
His chastening turned me back; 

"That more and more a Providence 
Of love is understood. 
Making the springs of time and sense 
Sweet with eternal good; 

"That death seems but a covered way 
Which opens into light. 
Wherein no blinded child can strdy 
Beyond tlie Father's sight; 



"And so the shadows fall apart. 
And so the west- winds play; 
And all the windows of my heart 
I open to the day." 



But the poem of Whittier which is nearer 
and dearer to our hearts than any other is 
"Snowbound." Its Flemish pictures of old 
days can never fade from memory's wall. 
Without the icy breath of winter blows o'er 
the land while around the great fireplace sits 
the household in tumultuous privacy of storm 

and 

". . . the old, rude-furnished room 
Burst flower-like into rosy bloom," 

a bloom which will ever glow upon the pages 
of our American literature. In how many and 
many a life does "Snowbound" strike an an- 



THE MESSAGE OF WHITTIER 69 

swering chord! As the poet's words ring in 
our hearts, fond memory throws the light of 
other days around us. We sit again by hearth- 
fires that have long grown cold and dream of 
those whom here we see no more and long 

"... for the touch of a vanished hand 
And the sound of a voice that is still." 

Like Tennyson's "In Memoriam," "Snow- 
bound" is a cluster of blossoms from the 
valley and the shadow of death. It was written 
at an hour of loneliness and darkness and at 
least one of its stanzas came from an aching 
heart. Of his sister he writes thus: 

"As one who held herself a part 
Of all she saw, and let her heart 

Against the household bosom lean. 
Upon the motly-braided mat 
Our youngest and our dearest sat. 
Lifting her large, sweet, asking eyes, 

Now bathed in the unfading green 
And holy peace of Paradise. 
Oh, looking from some heavenly hUl, 

Or from the shade of saintly palms. 

Or silver reach of river calms. 
Do those large eyes behold me still? 
With me one little year ago: 
The chill weight of the winter snow 

For months up>on her grave has lain; 



70 JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 

The birds are glad; the brier-rose fills 
The air with sweetness; all the hills 
Stretch green to June's unclouded sky; 
But still I wait with ear and eye 
, For something gone which should be nigh, 

A loss in all familiar things, 
In flower that blooms, and bird that sings. 
And yet, dear heart! remembering thee. 

Am I not richer than of old? 
Safe in thy immortality. 

What change can reach the wealth I hold? 

What chance can mar the pearl and gold 
Thy love hath left in trust with me? 
And while in Life's late afternoon. 

Where cool and long the shadows grow, 
I walk to meet the night that soon 

Shall shape and shadow overflow, 
I cannot feel that thou art far. 
Since near at need the angels are; 
And when the sunset gates unbar, 

Shall I not see thee waiting stand. 
And, white against the evening star, 

The welcome of thy beckoning hand?" ' 

But another stanza of "Snowbound" marks the 
high-tide of Whittier's poetry: 

"What matter how the night behaved? 
What matter how the north- wind raved? 
Blow high, blow low, not all its snow 
Could quench our hearth-fire's ruddy glow. 
O Time and Change! with hair as gray 
As was my sire's that winter day. 
How strange it seems, with so much gone 
Of life and love, to still live on! 



THE MESSAGE OF WHITTIER 71 

Ah, brother! only I and thou 
Are left of all that circle now — 
The dear home faces whereupon 
That fitful firelight paled and shone. 
Henceforward, listen as we will. 
The voices of that hearth are still; 
Look where we may, the wide earth o'er. 
Those lighted faces smile no more. 
We tread the paths their feet have worn, 

We sit beneath their orchard trees. 

We hear like them the hum of bees 
And rustle of the bladed corn; 
We turn the pages that they read. 

Their written words we linger o'er. 
But in the sun they cast no shade. 
No voice is heard, no sign is made. 

No step is on the conscious floor! 
Yet Love will dream, and Faith will trust 
(Since He who knows our need is just), 
That somehow, somewhere, meet we must. 
Alas for him who never sees 
The stars shine through his cypress-trees! 
Who, hopeless, lays his dead away, 
Nor looks to see the breaking day 
Across the mournful marbles play! 
Who hath not learned, in hours of faith, 

The truth to flesh and sense unknown. 
That Life is ever lord of Death, 

And Love can never lose its own!" 

Words like these the world will not willingly 
let die. 

Whittier's deep and tranquil spirituality not 
only finds expression in his distinctively re- 



72 JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 

ligious poetry, but it passes beyond this and 
pervades more or less fully the whole body 
of his work. In it there is no Calvinistic gloom 
and severity but peace, light, love, and child- 
like trust. In the religious poetry of the New 
England Quaker we find a mingling of Puritan 
and Friend, of Justice and Love, of the stern 
creed of the dauntless Genevan and the simple 
faith of leather-clad George Fox. It was 
John Robinson, the pastor in Ley den of the 
men and women of the Mayflower, who uttered 
the pregnant sentence, "There is more light 
and more truth in God's blessed Word than 
has yet been revealed." The great gulf that 
is fixed between the dogmatic horrors of Michael 
Wigglesworth's "Day of Doom," the typical 
poem of the old New England, and the win- 
some inclusiveness of the simple creed of the 
Quaker poet demonstrates the significant fact 
that for two centuries of American life the 
thoughts of man had been widening with the 
process of the suns. The bells from a thousand 
steeples had rung out the darkness of the 
dismal days of The Scarlet Letter and the 
Salem witchcraft. In the poetry of Whittier 
we live in the brighter light of a nobler day. 
And as we walk over the mountains and 
through the valleys of life we can stand more 
firmly and fight better because our souls have 



THE MESSAGE OF WHITTIER 73 

been refreshed as we tarried with this sweet- 
voiced, clean-souled poet by the fountains of 
life abundant. 

Although there are still among us those who 
remember the poets of the New England 
renaissance as they came and went among 
their fellows, it was more than a quarter of a 
century ago that the last of that shining com- 
pany passed to where beyond these voices there is 
peace. Emerson, the serene earthquake scholar 
of Concord, and Longfellow, the gentle singer 
of our national springtime, died in the early 
eighties. Lowell, the youngest of the group, 
born over a century ago, February 22, 1819, 
died in the old elm-shaded home of his boy- 
hood in 1891. A year later ended the tranquil 
life of the militant, serene hermit of Ames- 
bury. In 1894 the lambent soul of the genial 
old autocrat, "the last leaf on the tree," felt 
the gentle touch of the breath of an eternal 
morning. To-day our souls thrill with the 
mighty impulses of a tremendous age. New 
voices are in the air and eyes that once were 
holden are seeing new visions. But not all 
that has come to us from other generations 
should be allowed to gather mold among the 
forgotten archives of the past. The writer 
who deals with the fundamentals of life and 
of character has eternal youth. From the 



74 JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 

quiet cottage at Amesbury have come lines 
heard around the world. Generations yet un- 
born will through the words of John Green- 
leaf Whittier learn the truths of God. Though 
dead he yet speaketh. 

"There is no end for souls like his; 
No night for children of the day." 



V 

THE ART OF BEING HUMAN 

Once when Father Taylor was lying upon 
what was supposed to be his deathbed, some 
one said, "Well, Father, you'll soon be with 
the angels." Quick as a flash the old preacher 
replied: 'T don't want angels. I want folks." 
After all, human sympathy is the quality 
which more than any other draws us to its 
possessor. We cannot help liking the person 
who has it. In some parts of the United States 
there is a provincialism which expresses an 
idea for which orthodox terminology is lacking. 
It is customary to speak commendatorily of a 
person as common. This is almost another 
word for human. Happy is he who meets the 
"common" man or woman. He whose expe- 
riences have given him human sympathy has 
that which is worth more to the world than 
the most minute and abstruse knowledge 
gathered in classroom and libraries. 

Dean Shaler once said, 'T have known many 
an ignorant sailor or backwoodsman who, be- 
cause he has been brought into sympathetic 
contact with the primitive qualities of his 

75 



76 JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 

kind, was humanely a better educated man 
than those who pride themselves on their 
culture." The French have a proverb, which 
being translated says, "Bom a man and died 
a grocer." With slight emendations this 
epigram can be adapted to dehumanized indi- 
viduals in various fields of activity: "Bom a 
man, and died a broker." Or it may be "and 
died a preacher" or "a college professor." 
The Germanization of the American university 
during the decades following the Franco- 
Prussian war has tended to produce the narrow 
specialist and the seed-pecking critic. Limi- 
tation of interests tends to shrivel the soul. 
The story is told of a lady who met at a dinner 
a well-dressed, attractive man with whom she 
unsuccessfully tried to carry on a conversa- 
tion. Among the subjects which she intro- 
duced were politics, literature, music, and even 
people, but she could get not a gleam of re- 
sponse. Finally, with consummate social tact 
the gentleman himself came to her rescue by 
saying, "I can't talk about these things. My 
line is lumber." A man's life is just about as 
large as the range of his interests. Nothing 
will take the place of the vital touch with 
things human. William James was able to 
make psychology thrill with life because he 
himself was vitally human. Professor Louns- 



THE ART OF BEING HUMAN 77 

bury made the ordinarily sleep-producing sub- 
ject of philology glow with genuine interest 
because he personally was in touch with the 
real things of earth. 

For over a quarter of a century William 
Dean Howells was the unchallenged dean of 
American letters. Seventy-odd volumes came 
from his tireless pen. Not one of them is the 
product of any fantastic feat of the imagina- 
tion. He simply chronicled the life which he 
sympathetically observed. From the banks of 
the Ohio to romance-haloed Venice was a long 
journey. But to this kindly, tolerant, brotherly 
lover of books and men, life was always life. 
To read the memory-gilded pages upon which 
he has written of a Boy's Town, along the great 
river whose changing and haunting beauty 
has not been lost although it no longer flows 
through a pathless wilderness as it did in the 
days when the birch bark canoe of the red 
man ruffled its gleaming waters, is vicariously 
to live the life of truth-loving, warm-hearted 
men and women of the days that are no more. 
As in the Years of My Youth we come into 
contact with the ideas and ideals of a later 
boyhood home not far from the sea-green 
waves of Lake Erie we feel the thrill of the 
westward march of the Puritan spirit. The 
man who depicted the subtle charm of Brahman 



78 JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 

New England, the hypnotic fascination of the 
seething whirl of our American Babylons, the 
inimitable charm of England's gray-stone ab- 
beys and ivy-clad towers, found no dull pages 
in the world's varied volume. In the follow- 
ing sentence Howells epitomizes the source of 
his own attractive power: "The way to be 
universally interesting is to be universally 
interested." 

The world to-day is every whit as interest- 
ing as it was when Chaucer's pilgrims journeyed 
from the Tabard Inn in Southwark to Canter- 
bury. "Books," says Stevenson, "are a mighty 
bloodless substitute for life." We read so that 
we can better understand the real world which 
is mirrored forth in the world of letters. With- 
out attempting to add to the high plethora of 
deJBnitions of education, it can be truly said 
that education means the broadening of an 
individual's experience. President Thwing tells 
us that most college men who fail in life do so 
because of an inability to get along with 
people. A man can succeed in no public ca- 
pacity unless he understands humanity. He 
cannot do this unless he has previously known 
intimately and appreciatively dozens, possibly 
hundreds, of people in both literature and life. 

The late Dr. William T. Harris, for many 
years commissioner of education, once spoke of 



THE ART OF BEING HUMAN 79 

literature as "vicarious experience." What a 
world of suggestion in the phrase! The man 
whose knowledge of life depends upon his own 
personal experience is almost certain to be 
"cabined, cribbed, confined" in his outlook 
upon the world's thought and activities. Real 
literature is not something to give to "airy 
nothing a local habitation and a name." 
Writing that is not irradiated with life is 
sounding brass and tinkling cymbal. Shake- 
speare looms great among the children of 
genius because his range of human sympathy 
was larger than that of any other man who 
has recorded the thoughts of his heart upon 
the printed page. George Eliot has written 
volumes characterized by an encyclopedic learn- 
ing, but the books which for generations to 
come will keep her memory green are those 
which tell of the men and women whom she 
learned to know and love in her girlhood among 
the hedgerows of Warwickshire. The best of 
Emerson comes not from his "transcendental 
moonshine," but from his power to see below 
the surface in the lives of flesh and blood men 
and women. Being quoted a million times 
will not make threadbare Pope's truth, "The 
proper study of mankind is man." 

To value books more than people means 
arrant pedantry. To treat persons as though 



80 JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 

they are things is a cardinal sin against so- 
ciety. Broadmindedness, some widely - pro- 
claimed opinions to the contrary notwithstand- 
ing, does not necessarily mean laxity of ethics. 
Neither is the person with definite ideas in 
regard to right and wrong invariably narrow 
in his outlook. The broad man is one of broad 
sympathies and wide affinities. His most dis- 
tinguishing characteristic is the power to put 
himself in another person's place. He can 
disagree with his neighbor and at the same 
time respect him and his point of view. The 
old deacon who said, "If I am wrong, I am 
willing to be convinced, but I'd like to see 
the man who could do it," merely furnished 
a most delightful illustration of the intoler- 
ance of crass stupidity. The really humanized 
son of Adam does not want to make the world 
over after his own pattern. 

The surest way for an individual to de- 
personalize himself is to make his life a namby- 
pamby imitation of the career of some one 
else. Emerson says in his essay on "Self- 
Reliance," "We come to wear one cut of face 
and figure and acquire by degrees the gentlest 
asinine expression." The man who goes with 
the crowd will never be anything but one 
of them. A subservient follower never makes a 
leader. He who is too cowardly to live his 



THE ART OF BEING HUMAN 81 

own life annihilates his personality. Insipidity 
is the reward of the imitator. No one can do 
our living for us. We must make our own 
decisions and abide by their consequences. 
No decision in the last analysis is a wrong 
decision. In regard to the larger issues of life 
it is impossible to long halt between two 
opinions. "He that is not for me is against 
me." To live a life of half-hearted negative- 
ness or of cowardly compromise means the 
subtle but certain deterioration of the very 
foundations of the soul. Weakness breeds 
weakness: strength begets strength. Power of 
decision means ruggedness of personality. 

Snobbishness is another impeder of the 
development of a sincere, attractive personal- 
ity. In the Standard Dictionary we read the 
following: "Snob — a vulgar pretender to gen- 
tility or superior position; one who regards 
wealth and position rather than character." 
In other words, a snob is one who cares more 
for appearance than reality; one who sub- 
stitutes false standards for those that are 
true. For him life is not real; it is merely a 
spectacle. His world is a stage upon which 
he can "strut and fret." He does not enjoy 
good society but takes pleasure in being seen 
in it. It was said of a certain ecclesiastical 
politician in England that he was "a dexterous 



82 JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 

worshiper of the rising sun." In his lexicon a 
friend was one who could advance his interests. 
But, after all, the world is so constructed that 
it pays a man to be his real self and to judge 
other human beings by the genuine standards 
of worth. 

A number of years ago an American politician 
won considerable notoriety by coining the 
proverb, "A cheap coat makes a cheap man.*' 
Was there ever more falsity compressed into 
seven words.? Many a man worth his weight 
in gold has worn a cheap coat. Abraham 
Lincoln with his homemade shirt and "jeans" 
trousers, upheld by one "yarn gallus" and 
terminating somewhere between the knees and 
the ankles was not a "cheap man." In real 
worth of manhood there was enough of him 
to outweigh at least a thousand of the per- 
fumed poodles of the gold coast. A number of 
years ago I noticed a great crowd standing 
in the corridor of a metropolitan railroad sta- 
tion. Upon inquiring the cause of the gather- 
ing I discovered that a certain widely adver- 
tised wife-hunting, fortune-seeking duke would 
pass that way in a few minutes. Soon the 
eager, anxious throng was rewarded by the 
sight of the son of a line of British earls, a 
bandy-legged weakling with receding forehead 
and evil, dissipated face. But his title won 



THE ART OF BEING HUMAN 83 

for him an American wife and an American 
fortune. It is a tragically false measure of 
judgment which would make us bow before 
a title or wealth possessed by one with nothing 
else to commend him. 

Equally obnoxious is the intellectual snob. 
Now and then we meet a man who goes through 
life with the assumption tliat because his name 
is on the alumni roll of some great institution 
he is among the chosen ones of earth, inde- 
pendent of his knowledge, his eflSciency, his 
personality, or his character. If any of us 
acquire the habit of looking upon the educa- 
tion which we have been given at the ex- 
pense of society as a possession which gives us 
the right to look with sneering contempt upon 
our fellow men, we become what Roosevelt 
called "undesirable citizens." "No man ever 
had a point of pride that was not injurious 
to him." To use a wrong criterion in judging 
either others or ourselves tends to corrode our 
lives and our souls with falseness. 

It is, nevertheless, possible to be entirely 
sincere and unselfish without being human. 
In Wordsworth's little poem "She Was a 
Phantom of Delight" one of the finest tributes 
paid to his wife is in the line, "A creature not 
too bright or good for human nature's daily 
food." An (Outstanding fault in Tennyson's 



84 JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 

"Idylls of the King" is his portrait of King 
Arthur as a monstrosity of icy perfection. 
Ice water in the veins is a poor substitute for 
red blood. There are unfortunately attractive 
sinners and sour saints. A human iceberg is 
always a poor sort of a Christian. Oftentimes 
a thin-lipped, critical, unsympathetic church- 
man makes religion repulsive to an entire 
community. Jesus did not glorify the narrow, 
repressed, circumscribed life; he preached the 
gospel of the life abundant. Long-facedness is 
not a sign of spirituality. In the words of 
Carlyle: "The man who cannot laugh is not 
only fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils, 
but his whole life is already a treason and a 
stratagem.'* The lack of a sense of humor 
means the lack of imagination, and hard in- 
deed is it for him aflBicted in this way to have 
a sympathetic understanding of life and of 
humanity. But life itself is the greatest of 
all teachers. We educate each other. The 
better we know our fellow men the more toler- 
ant we become. The years teach us that man 
is not black spotted white, but white spotted 
black. Experience is the real humanizer. 

It is said that at a certain stage in the 
initiation of the Buddhist priest the postulant 
reaches a certain door and before he can pro- 
ceed farther he is asked the question, "Art 



THE ART OF BEING HUMAN 85 

thou a man?" "Art thou human?" is not an in- 
appropriate interrogation with which to greet 
a young man standing at the portals of those 
professions which have to do not with things 
but with people. "What you are speaks so 
loudly that I cannot hear what you say." 
In the long run, success or failure depends 
upon what we make of ourselves. The elusive 
factor called personality is the most potent 
force beneath the shining stars. Man is his 
own ancestor. Edwin M. Stanton is quoted 
as saying: "Every man over fifty is respon- 
sible for his face." More than this we are the 
molders of our characters, the makers of our 
personalities. Arnold of Rugby was bigger 
than anything he did. In the biography of 
Mark Twain we find a man greater than the 
books which came from his pen. Andrew 
Carnegie was more than his millions. Roose- 
velt the man looms larger than Roosevelt the 
statesman. Thomas Carlyle as a Scotch 
farmer would have been a man of mark in 
his little world. There can easily be too many 
bloodless automatons of efficiency or deperson- 
alized bundles of erudition, but never too many 
red-blooded, true-hearted, life-loving friends and 
helpers of mankind. 



VI 

THE WHITE WATER LILY 

In Theodore Storm's modest little classic 
Immensee, a book which epitomizes the tragedy 
of a vanished hope, the young man walks in 
the pale calm moonlight by the shores of a 
tranquil inland sea. Before his eyes fair pic- 
tures come and go. He sees 

"Such sights as youthful poets dream 
On summer eve by haunted stream." 

Far out upon the crystal surface of the fair 
and placid lake like a fallen star there gleams 
a solitary water lily, white as the clouds that 
float beneath the blue sky of a summer's day. 
An indescribable longing to possess the lonely 
flower seizes the young man's heart. Soon 
the sturdy strokes of the swimmer break the 
stillness of the silent night. He swims and 
swims, but still the lily is far, far in the dim 
distance. At last he turns his face shoreward 
and never once does he look back upon the 
fragrant bloom which he had so ardently longed 
to make his own. To this young man the 
white flower symbolized one whom he had 

86 



THE WHITE WATER LILY 87 

loved and lost in the days when his sky was 
gilded with the auroral light of youthful ro- 
mance and his heart sang the dulcet strains 
of love's old sweet song. But to strive for the 
unattainable is the common lot of man. 

We all live in two worlds. We know full 
well this practical, everyday world, this world 
of getting and spending, where the fittest 
survive and the weak go down in the fight, 
where the blight of sin and ignorance causes 
the fairest flowers of life to fade and wither. 
It is this realm of which Shelley sings in words 
of real pathos: 

"We look before and after. 

And pine for what is not; 
Our sincerest laughter 

With some pain is fraught. 
Our sweetest songs are those 

That tell of saddest thought." 

But we live, too, in another world: in the 
world of dreams: in the heaven-illumined land 
of the ideal. Here we forget the harsher 
realities of life and catch faint adumbrations of 
the golden days which are yet to be. Here 
there 

"... falls not hail or rain or any snow. 
Nor ever wind blows loudly; but it lies 
Deep-meadowed, happy, fair, with orchard lawns 
And bowery hollows crowned with summer sea." 



88 JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 

For many of us the land ideal looms up 
against the misty backgrounds of the past. 
There is that within man which makes him 
idealize bygone days. The remembrance of 
them brings to the heart that 

". . . feeling of sadness and longing 
That is not akin to pain, 

And resembles sorrow only 
As the mist resembles the rain." 

It is this feeling of sadness which the deep- 
voiced Tennyson describes in words of never- 
dying melody: 

"Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean. 
Tears from the depth of some divine despair 
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes. 
In looking on the happy autumn fields. 
And thinking of the days that are no more." 

We stand upon the summit of the mountain 
and view the road by which we have ascended 
as it winds through the valley and over the 
foothills and our souls are thrilled by its 
beauty. We see it curve through sylvan dells, 
through fertile farms, through the tree-em- 
bowered village. We forget the long and 
toilsome journey, the blazing sun of the noon- 
day, the summer storms that blew from the 
mountains. Across the emerald-clad sward of 



THE WHITE WATER LILY 89 

the years, like the sound of sweet bells in tune, 
come the words of New England's crystal- 
toned bard: 

"I can see the breezy dome of groves, 

The shadows of Deering's Woods 
And the friendships old and the early loves 
Come back with a Sabbath sound, as of doves 

In quiet neighborhoods. 
And the verse of that sweet old song, 
It flutters and murmurs still : 
'A boy's will is the wind's will. 
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.' 

"I remember the gleams and the glooms that dart 
Across the schoolboy's brain; 
The song and the silence in the heart. 
That in part are prophecies and in part 
Are longings wild and vain. 
And the voice of that fitful song 
Sings on, and is never still : 
*A boy's will is the wind's will. 
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.' 

"Strange to me now are the forms I meet 

When I visit the dear old town. 

But the native air is pure and sweet. 

And the trees that o'ershadow each well-known street. 

As they balance up and down. 

Are singing the beautiful song. 

Are sighing and whispering still : 

'A boy's will is the wind's will, 
[And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts,' " 



90 JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 

When fond memory throws the light of other 
days around us we Hve amid the Arcadian 
beauty of the land ideal. 

But hfe's golden age is never in the past. 
Dreams of a brighter future make it easier 
for men to bear the burdens of a darkened 
present. The lank, ungainly backwoods boy, 
who lay before the open in a rude Illinois 
cabin reading over and over Mason Weems's 
quaint old Life of Washington, forgot the pov- 
erty and crudeness of his surroundings as he 
looked across the future's untrodden fields to 
the day when on his shoulders would rest the 
mantle of the Cincinnatus of the West. The 
boy who trod the towpaths of the Western 
Reserve dreamed of the thousands whom he 
should some day sway by the power of his 
eloquence. 

On a rocky New England farm, so lonely 
that even now ever and anon the white-footed 
deer forsakes his leafy covert and drinks from 
the streamlet in the meadow, there lived and 
toiled a dark-eyed Quaker lad. How hard 
was his lot! How narrow his life! But Green- 
leaf Whittier had seen the vision. The plow- 
boy of the Merrimac valley had heard the lute- 
like voice of the plowman of the bonnie fields 
of Ayr. The light that never was on land or 
sea shone over that barren little farm and the 



THE WHITE WATER LILY 91 

world is richer to-day because that Quaker 
lad followed the gleam. 

Long ago, when the spacious times of the 
great Elizabeth were fading in sweeping clouds 
of glory from the earth, the youthful John 
Milton set before himself the sublime ideal 
of writing a poem which the world would not 
willingly let die. Even then did he realize 
that he who would write an heroic poem must 
first live an heroic life. He passed through 
the fiery furnace of young manhood without 
the smell of smoke upon his garments. Year 
after year he burned the scholar's lamp of 
toil and sacrifice. When the clouds of fratricidal 
war hung like a pall over the land he doffed 
his singer's mantle blue and donned the armor 
of an intellectual gladiator. In the battle for 
the liberty of the English people the quiet 
scholar stood in the foremost ranks. Sorrow 
walked with him. The day came when the 
blind bard sat in ever-enduring darkness and 
saw no more 

"The sweet approach of even or morn. 
Or sight of vernal bloom or summer's rose. 
Or flocks, or herds or human face divine." 

The men who with him battled in the halls 
of state and those as well who upon the field 
of carnage had fought for Cromwell and the 



92 JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 

Lord were wandering fugitives and outcasts in 
distant lands or daily laying down their lives 
upon the crimson scaffold; where once the rug- 
ged, stern, indomitable old Oliver had bowed 
before the throne of the Lord God of Israel a 
licentious, lascivious, voluptuous court con- 
temned all that was pure and righteous and 
holy. In that hour of darkness and peril and 
gloom John Milton gave to the world a poem 
that it will never let die. When the time 
came for him to pass to where beyond these 
voices there is peace his dying lips were heard 
to murmur, "Still guides the heavenly vision." 
"Where there is no vision the people perish." 
It is the vision splendid which impels men to 
forsake the primrose path of ease and walk 
the rough and stony road of usefulness, a 
road which many, many times has been the 
path by which the sons of earth have reached 
the tablelands above. 



*Not once or twice in our fair island-story 
The path of duty was the way to glory. 
He that, ever following her commands, 
On with toil of heart and knees and hands. 
Through the long gorge to the far light has won 
His path upward and prevailed, 
Shall find the toppling crags of Duty scaled 
Are close uj)on the shining tablelands 
To which our God himself is moon and sun." 



THE WHITE WATER LILY 93 

He who follows the vision climbs the steep 
ascent through peril, toil, and pain. Wendell 
Phillips was a ten-talented man; fortune had 
emptied her horn at his feet. He was what 
Dr. Holmes called "A Brahman of the Brah- 
raans." In his veins flowed New England's 
bluest blood; physical beauty and mental 
capacity alike were his portion; to him the 
sirens of ambition sang their sweetest songs; 
the world stretched before him full of pleasant 
possibilities. Already he saw himself the 
idol of society, the spokesman of New Eng- 
land conservatism in the halls of the nation, 
the successor of the golden-mouthed Webster, 
the compatriot of the idolized Sumner. But, 
like the note of a battle trumpet a call re- 
sounded throughout the length and breadth 
of the land, and when the young lawyer heard 
it, it did not fall on unresponsive ears. Then 
he felt, as he afterward said, "I love inex- 
pressibly these streets of Boston over which 
my mother led my baby feet; and if God grants 
me time enough, I shall make them too pure 
for the footsteps of a slave." In the years to 
come, in every great struggle against long- 
entrenched evil, his was the white plume that 
ever waved in the forefront of the embattled 
hosts of righteousness. Uncompromising, in- 
tolerant, and profoundly mistaken as he some- 



94 JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 

times was, the world is a better place because 
this New England idealist lived in it. The 
time will come when his eloquence, "like the 
song of Orpheus, will fade from a hving memory 
into a doubtful tale," but two thousand years 
hence the echoes of his regal soul will not be 
silent; the memory of his dauntless courage, 
his heroic sacrifice, and his unswerving loyalty 
to truth shall not have perished from the 
earth. 

The ideal ever molds the man. "He who 
surrenders himself to a great ideal becomes 
great." Long ago it was written, "As a man 
thinketh in his heart so is he." Lowell says; 

"Of all the myriad moods of mind 

That through the soul come thronging. 
Which one was e'er so dear, so kind, 

So beautiful as Longing? 
The thing we long for, that we are 

For one transcendent moment, 
Before the Present poor and bare 

Can make its sneering comment." 

The man whose ideal is the heroic becomes a 
hero. The youth who in the realm of the 
vision lives in contact with greatness becomes 
great. They who think of those things which 
are true and honest and just and pure and 
lovely and of good report grow in grace and 



THE WHITE WATER LILY 95 

in beauty of personality as the years go by. 
The vision splendid may fade into the 
light of common day, but it leaves a glory 
behind it. 

Yet the youth who swam out across the 
lake for the white water lily came back with- 
out it. Many of the noblest of earth's ideals 
have never been realized. Often when we 
seize the flower its bloom is shed. Sometimes 
when we think of the world's multitudinous 
incongruities we feel that life is a succession 
of comedies. Then we can sympathize with 
the words of Thackeray: "Such people as 
there are living and flourishing in the world — 
faithless, hopeless, and charityless. Let us 
have at them, dear friends, with might and 
main." But when we look deeper, more and 
more we feel that life is a tragedy more real 
than any depicted by the pen of an ^Eschylus 
or Shakespeare. In this tragi-comedy of life 
seldom is it that man reaches the goal of his 
aspirations. Whittier's familiar folk-ballad, 
"Maud Muller," strikes an answering chord 
in many a heart: 

"God pity them both! And pity us all. 
Who vainly the dreams of youth recall. 

"For of all sad words of tongue or pen. 
The saddest are these: 'It might have been!' 



96 JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 

"Ah well ! for us all some sweet hope lies 
Deeply buried from human eyes; 

"And, in the hereafter, angels may 
Roll the stone from its grave away!" 

In every life there is some sad sweet "might 
have been." There is a faded hope and an 
unrealized ideal. 

"Something beautiful has vanished. 
And we sigh for it in vain. 
And we seek it everywhere. 
On the earth and in the air. 
But it never comes again." 

Yet often the vanished ideal is the supreme 
glory of a life. In an address delivered at 
Harvard College one of America's most eminent 
and high-minded statesmen said: "Ideals are 
like stars. They are not to be reached but to 
be followed." 

I remember in my boyhood hearing the old 
men talk about the underground railway 
days when the rural calm of my native valley 
was broken by the advent of the Southern 
slave drivers, with their iron fetters and their 
baying hounds, in search of their runaway 
property. Often have I been shown the lonely 
road by which these pursued and timorous 
black men stole by night from the valley to 
the hospitable farmhouse among the blue hills 



THE WHITE WATER LH^Y 97 

to the north. Many a time on snowy moon- 
light nights as I traveled that road I thought 
of the dusky pilgrims from the sloping banks 
of the rivers of Old Virginia and the cotton- 
whitened fields of Dixie's southernmost lands. 
Often I saw above me, as my thoughts turned 
to those who had once trodden that winding 
highway, the north star which those wan- 
derers followed so many weary miles amid the 
thick darkness of night, shining pure, steady, 
and serene just as it shone on untold genera- 
tions of those whom here we see no more. 
They who followed that star never reached it, 
but they reached the freedom for which they 
longed. To them it was the beacon which 
led to liberty. A man's ideal is his polar star; 
he may never attain it, but by following it 
he may reach the higher altitudes and the 
purer atmosphere of a better country, a land 
where life is larger and fuller and richer and 
freer. It is not the accomplishment which 
counts but the honest effort. One of the most 
deep-sighted seers who ever walked the shores 
of earth once told us: 
"Not on the vulgar mass 

Called 'work' must sentence pass, 

Things done that took the eye and had the price; 

O'er which, from level stand. 

The low world laid its hand. 

Found straightway to its mind, could value m a trice: 



98 JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 

"But all the world's coarse thumb 
And finger failed to plumb. 
So passed in making up the main account. 
All instincts immature. 
All purposes ensure. 

That weighed not as his work, yet swelled the man's 
amount; 

"Thoughts hardly to be packed 
Into a narrow act, 

Fancies that broke through language and escaped. 
All I could never be. 
All men ignored in me, 

That was I worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher 
shaped." 

The fight for the ideal may be a losing fight, 
but it is never a fight in vain. Phillips Brooks 
says, "If you aim at the stars you will hit 
the tree tops." Man is better for every high 
ideal, for every noble purpose, for every lofty 
aspiration. There have been idealists who 
have worn the laurel wreath of victory; there 
have been those who have sadly trodden the 
via dolorosa of affliction and defeat, but the 
God who notes the fall of every sparrow, who 
hath clothed the lilies of the fields with in- 
effable fragrance and beauty, knoweth them all 
by name, and, like the stars, they shall shine 
in his firmament forever and ever. But the 
real idealist is not the idle dreamer of any 
empty day who sails away from the lands of 



THE WHITE WATER LILY 99 

earth on ethereal seas of abstractions. He 
understands that 

"The common problem, yours, mine, everyone's 
Is not to fancy what were fair in life 
Provided it could be — but, finding first 
What may be, then find how to make it fair 
Up to our means: a very different thing." 

In the never-dying words of Tennyson we 
read of that glorious company who gathered 
around the blameless Arthur's throne: of the 
pure Sir Percival; of Gareth in all the splendor 
of his youthful beauty; of Launcelot, the 
bravest and the strongest of the knights; of 
Galahad, with the strength of ten because his 
heart was pure. Upon a later, sadder, darker 
day we hear the once proud king tell of how 
he made them lay their hands in his and 
swear 

"To reverence the King, as if he were 
Their conscience, and their conscience as their King. 
To break the heathen and uphold the Christ, 
To ride abroad redressing human wrongs, 
To speak no slander, no, nor listen to it. 
To honor his own word as if his God's, 
To lead sweet lives in purest chastity, 
To love one maiden only, cleave to her. 
And worship her by years of noble deeds. 
Until they won her 



100 JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 

Not only to keep down the base in man. 
But teach high thought, and amiable words 
And courtliness, and the desire of fame. 
And love of truth and all that makes a man." 

But there fell before the lances of these brave 
and valiant knights the robber barons who 
preyed upon the poor. One by one their 
proud castles yielded. No more was the long 
howling of the wolves to be heard amid the 
snow. Peace smiled again upon the land. 
The wilderness and the solitary place were 
made glad and the desert blossomed as the 
rose. Chivalrous knights worshiped at the 
shrine of fair and gracious womanhood. A 
wise and good ruler in many-towered Camelot 
meted out even-handed justice to all who 
bowed before his throne. But there came a 
time when war, famine, and desolation once 
more cast their shadow over Arthur's realm, 
when a renegade knighthood and a faithless 
queen brought sorrow to the heart of the 
blameless ruler, when in his anguish he sadly 
cried, "My knights have followed wandering 
fires and left present wrongs to right them- 
selves." Sad is it indeed when life-detached 
ideals call men away from the common duties of 
common life to follow a glimmering light which 
leads to nowhere; nevertheless the world can- 
not but pay its meed of praise, of well-deserved 



THE WHITE WATER LILY 101 

praise, to the unswerving tenacity, the daunt- 
less daring, and the heroic spirit of self-sacrifice 
which very often is the portion of the follower 
of the wandering fire. But lofty idealism with- 
out practical eflBciency is of little avail. The 
eflScient idealist is no melancholy, mild-eyed 
lotus eater, who muses and dreams and 
broods with half-shut eyes while the great 
currents of life sweep irresistibly by. Yet it 
is "In deeds he takes delight." All of life 
is not included in the "practical." As the 
hart panteth after the water brooks the spirit 
of man longs to rise, with wings as eagles, 
above the things of time and place. No life 
is so dark that it cannot be illumined by the 
presence of the heaven-born ideal; no heart 
is so despondent that it cannot pulsate with 
hope. The white water lily very often sheds 
its fragrance upon lonely moor and desolate 
fen. "We are such stuff as dreams are made 
on." Man can never live by bread alone. 
He must endure as seeing Him who is invisible. 



vn 

THE FUNDAMENTAL TEACHING OF 
THOMAS CARLYLE^ 

When Thomas Carlyle gave his inaugural 
address as Lord Rector of the University of 
Edinburgh, memory threw around him the 
light of other days and he lived once more 
in that year of the long ago when he left the 
hills of Dumfriesshire for the ancient seat of 
learning in whose halls he once more stood. 
*Tt is now," he said, "fifty-six years gone last 
November since I first entered your city, a 
boy of not quite fourteen, to attend the classes 
here, and gain knowledge of all kinds, I could 
little guess what, my poor mind full of wonder 
and awe-struck expectation." Unlike his Amer- 
ican friend, Emerson, Carlyle did not spring 
from a line of scholars. He was the first of 
his race to grapple with the mysteries of books. 
His boyhood home was a peasant's cottage, 
and the greatest lessons of his life were those 
which he learned by its fireside. His strong. 



' By permission of The Methodist Review, Nashville, Tennessee. 

102 



THOMAS CARLYLE 103 

sturdy, earnest, veracious father and his gentle, 
affectionate, yearning, solicitous mother were 
both fundamentally religious. Their religious 
heritage was Dissent. They belonged to the 
group known as "Burgher-Seceders," or "New 
Lichts." Their son tells us that "a man who 
awoke to the belief that he actually had a 
soul to be saved or lost was apt to be found 
among the dissenting people." The most ten- 
derly cherished ambition of the Carlyles for 
their nobly endowed first-bom son was that 
some day he should "wag his pow in the 
pulpit." It was to prepare him to be a spiritual 
leader that they toiled and sacrificed in order 
to send him to the university. 

But, as has been true of many another father 
and mother, the hopes of James and Janet 
Carlyle were not to be realized in the way 
which they expected. In those years at Edin- 
burgh the young student was called upon to 
battle with "spiritual dragons." In his life 
there came hours when he felt that the old 
faith, hallowed by the sweetest and most 
precious memories, was naught but the idle 
dream of a darkened age. It also became 
more and more apparent that a dyspeptic 
genius like Thomas Carlyle would by no means 
be an ideal pastor for any people. He was 
called upon to endure years of doubt and 



104 JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 

drifting. But as the years passed one by one 
the clouds vanished from his sky. 

It was in June, 1821, when he was twenty- 
six years of age, when, as he says, he "authen- 
tically took the devil by the nose" and began 
to attain those convictions by which his later 
life was governed. In 1830, in speaking of 
this period of liberation, he says, "This year I 
found that I had conquered all my skep- 
ticisms, agonizing doubts, fearful wrestlings 
with the foul, vile, and soul -murdering mud- 
gods of my epoch; had escaped from Tartarus, 
with all its Phlegetons and Stygian quagmires, 
and was emerging free in spirit into an eternal 
blue of ether where, blessed be heaven, I have, 
for the spiritual part, ever since lived, looking 
down upon the welterings of my poor fellow- 
creatures in such multitudes and millions still 
stuck in the fatal elements, and have no con- 
cern whatever in their Puseyisms, ritualisms, 
metaphysical controversies, and cobwebberies. 
I understood well what the old Christian people 
meant by conversion — by God's infinite mercy 
to them. I had in effect gained an immense 
victory, and for a number of years, in spite 
of nerves and chagrins, had a constant in- 
ward happiness that was quite royal and su- 
preme, in which temporal evil was transient 
and insignificant, and which essentially re- 



THOMAS CARLYLE 105 

mains with my soul, though far oftener ecHpsed 
and lying deeper down than then. Once more 
thank heaven for its highest gift." 

The doubts which so long like a fog had 
surrounded him had departed. In the battle 
with fear faith was triumphant. It could be 
said of him as Tennyson wrote of Arthur 
Hallam : 

"He fought his doubts and gathered strength, 
He would not make the judgment blind. 
He faced the specters of the mind 
And laid them; thus he came at length 

"To find a stronger faith his own. 

And power was with him in the night. 
Which makes the darkness and the light. 
And dwells not in the light alone." 

From that time forth in many a noble vol- 
ume, some of which the world will not willingly 
let die, Thomas Carlyle preached a gospel, 
which with "true prophetic eloquence" has 
reached the hearts of men. No man has 
spoken to our modern times with more of the 
spirit and power of the stern, militant, truth- 
loving, truth-telling prophets of Israel. Over 
against the cynical doubt of the skeptic, Car- 
lyle set the "Everlasting Yea" of the great 
God, He was a heaven-sent messenger pro- 
claiming the law of truth, the nobility of 



106 JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 

labor, the glory of independence and the dom- 
inance of the "eternal verities." He was a 
preacher of repentance, of righteousness, and 
of retribution. He was perhaps the most 
potent ethical and religious force of his cen- 
tury. And to-day, when most of the shovel- 
hatted, mammon-worshiping ecclesiastics of his 
generation have gone their journey to a lasting 
oblivion, the voice of the rugged, titanic old 
Scotchman is still lifted against wrong and 
still sounds a message of inspiration and of hope. 
Carlyle's theology, like the man himself, is 
a bundle of paradoxes. To attempt to un- 
ravel its intricate threads would mean the 
facing of a task of almost terrifying formidable- 
ness. The author of Sartor Resartus and 
The French Revolution exercised to the ut- 
most the prerogative of genius to be incon- 
sistent. But at least a word may be said in 
regard to the great writer's fundamental creed. 
Most emphatically he was not, as has been 
inanely said, "a great thinker without a 
theology.'* No man can do real thinking in 
regard to the vaster issues of life and entirely 
ignore theology. Professor Nichol in his life 
of Carlyle, after attempting to find Carlyle's 
creed by the process of elimination, writes the 
following pregnant paragraph: "What, then, is 
left of Carlyle's creed.? Logically little, emo- 



THOMAS CARLYLE 107 

tionally much. If it must be defined, it is 
that of a Theist with a difference. A spirit 
of flame from the empyrean, he found no 
food in the cold Deism of the eighteenth cen- 
tury. He inherited and determined to persist 
in the behef that there was a personal God — a 
Maker, voiceless, formless." To Emerson he 
writes in 1836, "My belief in a special Prov- 
idence grows yearly stronger, unsubduable, 
impregnable"; and later he said, "Some strange 
belief in Providence was always with me at 
intervals." Thus while asserting that "all 
manner of pulpits are as good as broken and 
abolished," he clings to the old Ecclefechan 
days. 

"To the last," says Mr. Froude, "he believed 
as strongly as ever a Hebrew prophet did in 
spiritual religion." He recommended prayer as 
"A turning of one's soul to the highest." 
Many times he spoke confidently of his belief 
that when a man dies he shall live again. On 
the death of Mrs. Carlyle's mother he wrote 
to her: "We shall yet go to her. God is great. 
God is good." But later this confident assur- 
ance seems to have been replaced by a calm, 
uncertain hope. 

Intellectually Carlyle had journeyed far from 
the faith of the Burgher-Seceders of his native 
village, but to the end of his life he was essen- 



108 JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 

tially Puritan. He tried to tear away the 
husks and keep the kernel. He was not, how- 
ever, entirely successful in doing this. Carlyle 
would have been a happier man, and in some 
respects a better man, if his life had been 
dominated by the vital Christianity of a 
Robert Browning. He excoriated Unitarians, 
but intellectually had much in common with 
them. Certain essentials of Christianity he 
threw away as "Hebrew old clothes." It is 
equally true that Carlyle was never able to 
completely rid himself of "the old clothes" 
of Calvinism. All of his life he did his think- 
ing more in terms of the Old Testament than 
of the New. Herein lay his strength and his 
weakness. He has been plausibly called "A 
Calvinist tinctured with German idealism." 
The Kantean transcendentalism with which 
Carlyle's wide reading had brought him into 
contact had to some extent opened the win- 
dows of his mind. He had naturally discarded 
some of the monstrosities of the crude Puri- 
tanism of his early environment. But the 
metaphysic of Calvinism was the most potent 
influence of his life. 

It is by turning from Carlyle's ill digested, 
haphazard theology to his militant, glowing, 
and sincere philosophy of life that we find 
the source of his Herculean strength. Even 



THOMAS CARLYLE 109 

though clouds and darkness at times surrounded 
him for over half a century, he preached to 
upward-striving, light-seeking men and women 
the gospel of the reality of the spiritual. He 
called his generation to turn from the meat 
which perisheth to the eternal verities. To 
him as to any spiritually minded man, the 
idea of an absentee God and a mechanical 
universe was chilling and repulsive. The 
thought of God and of his presence in the 
world inspired some of Carlyle's most mag- 
nificent lines. In the chapter of Sartor Resartus 
entitled "The Everlasting Yea" we read: 
"Fore-shadows, call them rather fore-splendors 
of that Truth and Beginning of Truths, fell 
mysteriously over my soul. Sweeter than 
Dayspring to the ship^Tecked in Nova Zembla; 
ah, like the mother's voice to her little child 
that strays bewildered, weeping, in unknown 
tumults; like soft streamings of celestial music 
to my too-exasperated heart, came that Evan- 
gel. The Universe is not dead and demoniacal, 
a charnelhouse with specters; but Godlike 
and my Father's!" 

To an age of preeminent scientific achieve- 
ment he said: "With our Sciences and our 
Cyclopedias, we are apt to forget the divine- 
ness in these laboratories of ours. We ought 
not to forget it. That once well forgotten, I 



110 JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 

know not what else were worth remembering. 
Most sciences, I think, were then a very dead 
thing; withered, contentious, empty — a thistle 
in late autumn. These sciences without this 
are but the dead timber; it is not the growing 
tree and forest — which gives ever-new timber, 
among other things. Man cannot know either 
unless he can worship in some way." 

In Carlyle's day materialism as a philosophy 
had its able and aggressive defenders. To-day 
there is none so poor as to do it reverence. 
But that which counts is not so much what 
a man says he believes, or thinks he believes, 
but that which he really believes with sufficient 
intensity to translate into life. Wendell Phillips 
once scathingly said that if an American saw 
a silver dollar on the other side of hell he 
would jump in for it. In his excellent volume 
Personal Religion and the Social Awakening 
Professor Ross Finney says: "The philosophy 
of human life that dominates our own age, 
permeates its atmosphere, and obsesses the 
thought of nearly all our people is essentially 
materialistic. We are convinced that a man's 
life consists in the abundance of the things 
which he possesses." We seek for evidences 
of material success and power because they 
constitute the measure of value in modern 
life. Even in professions which exist primarily 



THOMAS CARLYLE 111 

to disseminate ideals there exists practically 
the same standard of values. The trail of 
the serpent is everywhere. Never was there 
a more vital need of men keeping before them 
the inclusive truth that the fundamental values 
of life are not material but spiritual. In Heroes 
and Hero-Worship Carlyle said, "A man's 
religion is the great fact in regard to his life." 
And with all of his dim gropings and thunder- 
ous sophistries for over half a century to 
England and to mankind in fiery words of 
golden eloquence he preached the Pauline 
gospel: "To be spiritually minded is life, and 
to be carnally minded is death." 

Not only against mammonism did he lift 
his mighty sword, but with the same fierce 
energy and titanic power he battled against 
the vapid dilettantism which sees in life nothing 
but a primrose path of pleasure. There came 
a time when he clearly saw that blessedness 
lies not in receiving but in giving, not in 
enjoying but in doing. The thought of the 
sacredness of work loomed large in the 
Carlylean philosophy of life. In Past and 
Present we read: "All true work is sacred; 
in all true work, were it but hand-labor, there 
is something of divineness. Labor, wide as 
the Earth, has its summit in Heaven. Sweat 
of the brow; and from that up to sweat of the 



m JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 

brain, sweat of the heart, which includes all 
Kepler calculations, Newton meditations, all 
Martyrdoms — up to that 'agony of bloody 
sweat' which all men have called divine. 
O brother, if this is not 'worship' the more the 
pity for worship, for this is the noblest thing 
yet discovered under God's sky. Who art 
thou that complainest of thy life of toil? 
Complain not. Look up, my wearied brother; 
see thy fellow workmen there, in God's eter- 
nity." Against the "clay -given mandate, 
*Eat thou and be filled,'" he placed the 
"God-given mandate, 'Work thou in well- 
doing.' " 

The idea of work cannot be dissociated from 
duty. Carlyle's Calvinistic ethics was by no 
means entirely negative in his life. He was 
indoctrinated with the old Puritan idea of 
righteousness. This inevitably meant an un- 
swerving loyalty to duty. This son of the 
ironside Scottish Calvinists believed not merely 
in work but in work well done. As he looked 
at the strong stone walls built by his father, 
James Carlyle, master mason of Ecclefechan, 
he said, "Let me write my books the way he 
buUt his houses." "The best way," he says, 
"to prepare for the great duties of life is to 
do well the small duty." Carlyle's teaching 
did not consist of a conglomerate of life-de- 



THOMAS CARLYLE 113 

tached theories; he was eminently practical. 
In one of his noblest passages he says: "The 
latest gospel in this world is, Know thy work 
and do it. Know thyself: long enough has that 
poor 'self of thine tormented thee; thou wilt 
never get to 'know' it, I believe. Think it not 
thy business, this knowing of thyseK; thou 
art an unknowable individual: know what 
thou canst work at, and work at it like a 
Hercules." 

And again he says: "It has been written, 
'an endless significance lies in work'; a man 
perfects himself by working. Foul jungles are 
cleared away, fair seed-fields rise instead, and 
stately cities; and withal the man himself 
first ceases to be a jungle and foul unwhole- 
some desert thereby. Consider how, even in 
the meanest sorts of labor, the whole soul of 
man is composed into a kind of real harmony 
the instant he sets himself to work. Doubt, 
Desire, Sorrow, Remorse, Indignation, Despair 
itself — all these like Hell dogs lie beleaguering 
the soul of the poor dayworker as of every 
man: but he bends himself with free valor 
against his task, and all these are stilled, all 
these shrink murmuring far into their caves. 
The man is now a man. The blessed glow of 
Labor is in him; is it not as a purifying fire, 
wherein all poison is burnt up, and of sour 



114 JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 

smoke itself there is made a bright blessed 
flame?" 

Carlyle understood that "happiness to be 
got must be forgot." The ripening experience 
of life taught him that if a man made it the 
object of his life to seek happiness, he was 
predooming himself to an existence of empty 
futility. He almost incessantly emphasized the 
fact that life is no mere "May-game for men." 
To his friend Sterling he said, "Woe unto them 
that are at ease in Zion." In Sartor Resartus 
he reiterates, "Love not pleasure, love God.'* 
To him as to the old Hebrews with whom he 
had so much in common, life was terribly and 
tragically earnest. With another great Puritan 
Carlyle believed that throughout his years 
upon earth he must live "As ever in his great 
Taskmaster's eye." 

The old Calvinistic emphasis upon retribu- 
tion was also one of the doctrines which he 
did not discard as a relic of mediaeval barbarism. 
The fact of sin loomed large in his thinking. 
There are to-day those who by means of 
widely disseminated teachings, miscalled ethical, 
are permeating American life with the baneful 
falsehood that there is no clear distinction 
between right and wrong. To Carlyle right 
and wrong were considerably more than 
"ancient, outworn. Puritanic traditions." Eze- 



THOMAS CARLYLE 115 

kiel's awful truth, "The soul that sinneth, it 
shall die" was of mighty import in his theology. 
In his Edinburgh address, in speaking to the 
students of his time-honored Alma Mater he 
said: 'Tf you will believe me, you who are 
young, yours is the golden season of life. As 
you have heard it called, so it verily is the 
seedtime of life; in which if you do sow tares 
instead of wheat, you cannot expect to reap 
well afterward." "Platitudes" some would 
call such words. They certainly contain no 
new thought. Paul, in his letter to the Gala- 
tians, used the same comparison to express the 
same thought, "Whatsoever a man soweth that 
shall he also reap." Yet no greater truth ever 
came from the heart and mind of man. He 
who has learned it to do it has mastered the 
greatest lesson of life. Carlyle never wrote a 
line in conflict with this fundamental ethical 
law. He never, as did Goethe in Faust, de- 
picted life in such a way as to give his reader 
the impression that a man could sin with im- 
punity. It must be admitted that in his 
inexcusable whitewashing of that incarnation of 
blood and murder known as Frederick the 
Great he attempts to gloss over some of the 
most nefarious deeds ever perpetrated by hu- 
man beings. But taking Carlyle's writings in 
mass they show that he loved right and hated 



116 JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 

wrong with all the intensity of his Puritan 
father. 

His description of the deathbed of Louis XV 
is in itself a sermon on "the exceeding sin- 
fulness of sin." "Yes, poor Louis, Death has 
found thee. No palace walls or lifeguards, 
gorgeous tapestries or gilt buckram of stiffest 
ceremonial could keep him out; but he is 
here, here at thy very life-breath and will 
extinguish it. . . . Unhappy man, there as thou 
turnest, in dull agony, on thy bed of weariness, 
what a thought is thine! Purgatory and Hell- 
fire, now as all too possible in the prospect; 
in the retrospect, alas, what thing didst thou 
do that were not better undone; . . . what 
sorrow hadst thou mercy on.'^ Do the 'five 
hundred thousand' ghosts who sank shame- 
fully on so many battlefields from Rossbach 
to Quebec, that thy Harlot might take revenge 
for an epigram — crowd round thee in this 
hour? Thy foul Harem; the curses of mothers, 
the tears and infamy of daughters.'^ Miserable 
man! thou 'hast done evil as thou couldst': 
thy whole existence seems one hideous abortion 
and mistake of Nature; the use and meaning 
of thee not yet known. Wert thou a fabulous 
Griffin devouring the works of men; daily 
dragging virgins to thy cave; clad also in 
scales that no spear would pierce: no spear 



THOMAS CARLYLE 117 

but Death's? A Griffin not fabulous but real! 
Frightful, O Louis, seem these moments for 
thee. — We will pry no further into the hor- 
rors of a sinner's deathbed." 

Carlyle's ethics was not a mass of abstract 
philosophical theorems. It was rooted and 
grounded in reality. He understood the in- 
separable relation existing between conduct and 
life. His fundamental ethical viewpoint can 
best be expressed in the words of Emerson, 
"The specific stripes may follow late after the 
offense, but they follow because they accom- 
pany it. Crime and punishment grow out of 
one stem. Punishment is a fruit that, unsus- 
pected, ripens within the flower of the pleasure 
which concealed it." It was Carlyle himself 
who said that Napoleon's empire was doomed 
to destruction because it was founded on in- 
justice. The Scottish Puritan, like Goethe, 
his exceedingly unpuritanic teacher, knew full 
well that although "the mills of God grind 
slowly, they grind exceeding small." Some 
have said that he taught that might makes 
right. This, however, is almost diametrically 
opposite to his teaching. Instead he believed 
that right makes might. He knew that the 
wages of sin is death, and this ancient and 
universal truth of life he unflinchingly faced. 

Taking it all in all, however, it was Carlyle's 



118 JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 

social teachings which had the greatest in- 
fluence upon the life and thought of his own 
and succeeding generations. Carlyle would 
have been a mighty force for social better- 
ment had he done nothing more than inspire 
John Ruskin to devote his life to righting deep- 
intrenched wrongs. But it cannot be denied 
that books like Chartism and Past and Present 
were potent weapons in the battle for the 
industrial and social liberation of the English 
people. Nowhere is the human problem of 
tliose early days better stated than in these 
words: "England is full of wealth, of multi- 
farious produce, supply for human want of 
every kind; yet England is dying of inanition. 
With unabated bounty the land of England 
blooms and grows; waving with yellow har- 
vests; thick-studded with workshops, industrial 
implements, with fifteen millions of workers 
understood to be the strongest, the cunningest, 
and the willingest our earth ever had; these 
men are here; the work they have done, the 
fruit they have realized is here, abundant, 
exuberant on every hand of us: and behold 
some baleful fiat as of enchantment has gone 
forth, saying, 'Touch it not, ye workers, ye 
master- workers, ye master-idlers; none of 
you can touch it, no man of you shall be the 
better for it; this is enchanted fruit!' On 



THOMAS CARLYLE 119 

the poor workers such a fiat falls first, in its 
rudest shape; neither can the rich master- 
idlers, nor any richest or highest man escape, 
but all are alike to be brought low with it, 
and made poor in the money sense or a far 
fataler one." His description in Past and 
Present of the paupers in the workhouse of 
St, Ives is one which it is not easy to forget. 
Economics he excoriated as the "dismal sci- 
ence"; sociology was then in its dim begin- 
nings; but he could readily see that where 
there was starving in the midst of plenty, 
poverty surrounded by luxury, sordid bru- 
tality side by side with swinish epicureanism 
there was a need of plain words and purpose- 
ful action. 

The years between 1830 and 1850, the period 
in which was accomplished Carlyle's most 
distinctive work, were marked by a political, 
industrial, and social revolution of tremendous 
moment. The people were beginning to make 
themselves heard. The dominant classes were 
compelled to relinquish a few of the privileges 
which an unjust caste system had given them. 
In 1828 the Test Act discriminating against 
Protestant Dissenters was repealed. The next 
year the Catholics won their victory in the 
passage of the Catholic Emancipation Bill. 
The First Reform Bill after a strenuous fight 



120 JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 

was passed in 1832. This bill was essentially 
a victory for the bourgeoisie in their battle 
with the rural landowning class. To the 
laborer it meant little, but it was a step in 
the right direction. During the next decade 
considerable legislation protecting the rank and 
file of the people from economic and social 
injustice was placed upon the statute books 
of the realm. The great event of the early 
years of the reign of Victoria was the Anti- 
Corn Law movement led by Richard Cobden 
and John Bright. All over England men, 
women, and children were on the verge of 
starvation on account of the high tariff laws 
which had been passed to conserve the priv- 
ileges of the landowning, game-preserving, 
lawmaking aristocracy. The fight was long 
and bitter, but June 25, 1846, the Corn Laws 
were repealed. Later came the agitation for 
a people's charter, giving the people of 
England still greater governmental prerogatives. 
This movement, which expressed the noblest 
idealism of many lives and contended for 
nothing more than simple justice, was not 
especially fortunate in its leadership and 
directly accomplished but little. Those were 
thrilling days in which to live. And Carlj'^le 
was not unawake to what was taking place 
around him. 



THOMAS CARLYLE 121 

He spoke of Peel's abolition of the Corn 
Laws as "the greatest veracity ever done." 
His interpretation of the deeper significance of 
chartism is both sympathetic and luminous. 
To many a young soldier in the army of the 
common good his words were both inspired 
and inspiring. The solution of the social 
problems by means of a benevolent despotism, 
such as he delineates in Past and Present, is 
of course palpably impossible. But no man 
of his generation had more at heart the ills 
of fellow men than Thomas Carlyle. And no 
man more lucidly and sincerely presented their 
cause. Some of his words sound surprisingly 
modern as we read them to-day. But in his 
demanding of economic justice he never failed 
to remember the fundamental reality of the 
spiritual. Here are words not without a high 
significance in the social gospel of Carlyle: 
"Brother, thou art a man, I think; thou art 
not a mere building Beaver or a two-legged 
Cotton-spider; thou hast verily a soul in thee, 
asphyxied or otherwise! Sooty Manchester, it 
is too built on the infinite Abysses; over- 
spanned by the skyey Firmaments; and there 
is birth in it, and death in it; and it is every 
whit as wonderful, as fearful, as unimaginable 
as the oldest Salem or Prophetic City. Go 
or stand, in what time, in what place we 



122 JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 

will, are there not immensities, Eternities 
over us, around us, in us." 

Carlyle's passion for social justice, unlike 
that of some modern intellectual amateurs, was 
not an evanescent fad. It sprang from his 
ingrained interest in himianity. Like Ben 
Adhem he loved his fellow men. In Carlyle's 
letters as found in the biography by Froude 
there are many comments upon human beings 
which give to the reader the impression that 
Carlyle was anything but a lover of his kind. 
It would be futile to deny that the sage of 
Chelsea was very much in the habit of throw- 
ing showers of vitriol on all men and things. 
Botli he and his gifted wife were adept in the 
art of making verbal etchings of the indi- 
viduals whom they met from time to time. 
And we are told that in etching use is made 
of acids. Neither of the Carlyles was frugal 
of acidic comment. His description of Rogers 
is only too typical: "A most sorrowful, dis- 
tressing, distracted old phenomena, hovering 
over the rim of deep eternities with nothing 
but light babble, fatuity, vanity, and the 
frostiest London wit in mouth." One does not 
have to read many pages of Carlyle's letters 
in order to collect a few dozen acrimonious 
personalities. But too much stress must not 
be laid on these acerbities, He liked to talk, 



THOMAS CARLYLE 123 

and some of his characterizations read much 
more cruelly than they sounded. Moreover, 
it would not be at all difficult to chronicle 
example after example of deeds of sacrificing 
kindness on the part of the sharp-tongued 
Scotchman. In his last years the larger part 
of his income was consumed by his deeds of 
charity. He has written certain passages which 
for their sheer humanity are unsurpassed in 
the literature of any people. 

In Sartor Resartus he says: "Poor wander- 
ing, wayward man! Art thou not tried, and 
beaten with stripes, even as I am.^* Ever, 
whether thou bear the royal mantle or the 
beggars gabardine, art thou not so weary, so 
heavy laden; and thy Bed of Rest is but a 
Grave. O my Brother, my Brother, why 
cannot I shelter thee in my bosom, and wipe 
away all tears from thy eyes.'^" Such words 
are not written by stony-hearted cynics. An- 
other passage which could have been sug- 
gested by Millet's "Man With the Hoe" reads: 
"Pity him too the Hard-handed, with bony 
brow, rudely combed hair, eyes looking out 
as in labor, in difficulty and uncertainty; 
Rude mouth, the lips coarse, loose, as in hard 
toil and lifelong fatigue they have got the 
habit of hanging — hast thou seen aught more 
touching than the rude intelligence, so cramped, 



124 JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 

yet energetic, unsubduable, true, which looks 
out of that marred visage? Alas, and his poor 
wife with her own hands, washed that cotton 
neckcloth for him, buttoned that coarse shirt, 
sent him forth creditably trimmed as she 
could." Here there is anything but the callous 
vapidity which sees in the toiling thousands 
naught but crude material for cruder ridicule. 
One of Carlyle's most beautiful and heart- 
thrilling paragraphs is his tribute to his mother: 
"Your poor Tom long out of his school days 
has fallen very tired and lame and broken on 
this pilgrimage of his, and you cannot help 
him or cheer him any more; but still from your 
grave in Ecclefechan churchyard you bid him 
trust in God. That he will try if he can under- 
stand and do." According to his own theory, 
he had found the secret of knowledge. In 
understanding the man and his writings this 
passage is considerable help: "One grand, in- 
valuable secret there is, however, which in- 
cludes all the rest, and, what is comfortable, 
lies clearly in every man's power: To have an 
open, loving heart, and what follows from the 
possession of such. Truly it has been said, 
emphatically in these days ought to be re- 
peated, a loving Heart is the beginning of all 
Knowledge." Carlyle may not always have 
kept his heart open to new light and truth, 



THOMAS CARLYLE 125 

but in it always there dwelt the spirit of 
love. 

In his old age Carlyle himself stated that 
he regarded truth as the Alpha and Omega 
of his message. Many an impetuous charge 
did he make against the citadels of falsehood. 
With him simple honesty was the crowning 
vu-tue. In speaking of his books he says: 
"I've had but one thing to say from beginning 
to end of them, and that was, that there's 
no other reliance for this world or any other 
but just Truth, and that if men did not want 
to be damned to all eternity they had best 
give up lying and all kinds of falsehood. That 
the world was far gone already through lying, 
and that there's no hope for it but just so far 
as men find out and believe the Truth and 
match their lives to it. But on the whole, 
the world has gone on lying worse than ever." 
In all of his writings, especially in Heroes and 
Hero Worship, do we see that his ultimate 
criterion in judging men is sincerity. He tells 
that Samuel Johnson, both practically and 
theoretically, preached this great gospel: 
" 'Clear your mind of Cant!' Have no trade 
with Cant: stand on the cold mud in the frosty 
weather, but let it be in your own real torn 
shoes." 

It goes without saying that the generation 



126 JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 

of Carlyle, just as much as that of Johnson, 
needed to be exhorted to avoid cant and to 
stand on the adamantine basis of reaHty. Is 
there one who would contend that such teach- 
ing is entirely inapplicable to us of a later age? 
In our speech how easy it is with superficial 
fluency parrotlike to rehash the ideas and 
words of others. Every profession has its own 
particular brand of cant. There is no move- 
ment of the age which does not inspire the 
eloquence of the retailer of second-hand verbi- 
age. It is easy to substitute oracular piety 
and long-faced religiosity for doing justice, 
loving mercy, and walking humbly with God. 
Nothing worth attaining is ever won without 
a Herculean effort. Strength of character does 
not fall as the gentle rain from heaven. Sin- 
cerity is the corner stone of real probity, but 
it cannot be acquired except by those who 
struggle to obtain it. Old-fashioned honesty, 
unswerving loyalty to truth, and incorruptible 
integrity are qualities which cannot loom too 
large in any life. Sometimes the hardest task 
which confronts an individual is to be honest 
with himself. It takes more than mere verbal 
sincerity to enable a man to look the facts 
of life straight in the face. To acquire the 
habit in the name of a silly optimism of glossing 
over the disagreeable phases of existence 



THOMAS CARLYLE 127 

means, in the last analysis, the selling of one's 
soul to the demons of falsehood. And it is 
certain that the man who has given days and 
nights to the study of the writings of Thomas 
Carlyle will find it at least a little harder to 
deviate from the straight and narrow path of 
truth. 

In Carlyle's passionate desire for reality we 
find the key to his theory of history and of 
life. Early in his career he set forth the idea 
that the fundamental task of the writer is to 
perceive and set forth the inexhaustible mean- 
ings of reality. He believed, moreover, that 
every fact, no matter how significant it might 
appear, had latent within it some truth of 
mighty import and that, above all else, man 
is called to be loyal to fact. Right living to 
him meant seeing the truth, proclaiming it, 
and doing it. In the marvelous pages of his 
essay on "Biography" he says: "Sweep away 
utterly all frothiness and falsehood from your 
heart; struggle unweariedly to acquire what is 
possible in every God-created man, a free, 
open, humble soul; speak not at all, in any 
wise, till you have somewhat to speak; care 
not for the reward of your speaking; then be 
placed in what section of Time and Space 
soever, do but open your eyes, and they shall 
actually see, and bring you real knowledge. 



128 JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 

wondrous and worthy of belief." In the 
same article he gives expression to another 
thought which cannot but have the ring of 
inspiration to every man who labors for human 
betterment: "Can we change but one single 
soap-lather and mountebank Juggler into a 
true Thinker and Doer, who even tries honestly 
to think and do, great will be our reward." 

This is what Carlyle for more than half a 
century tried to do. And many a man of 
light and leading has found his greatest teacher 
in the sharp-tongued, rugged old Scotchman, 
and upon the pages which he wrote has come 
into contact with "truths that perish never." 
Augustine Birrell, one of the cleverest of con- 
temporary critics, has been quoted as saying, 
"Young man, do not be in too great a hurry 
to leave your Carlyle unread." In spite of 
his angularities of personality and his pro- 
found errors of judgment, it cannot be denied 
that few indeed are the men of modern times 
who have meant as much to England and 
mankind as this Chelsea "Isaiah of the nine- 
teenth century." 



vin 

CROSS-EYED SOULS 

Recently while reading a story in one of 
the current magazines I came across the ex- 
pressive phrase "cross-eyed souls." It was 
used to describe those individuals who seem 
constitutionally unable to face the facts of life 
honestly. To become morally cross-eyed is 
comparatively easy. We are all somewhat in- 
clined to see things as we want to see them 
instead of seeing them as they are. There 
are times when it takes genuine courage to 
look squarely at a disagreeable situation. The 
man who tries to ignore the truth sooner or 
later will reach a place where he cannot dis- 
tinguish between the true and the false. Lies 
begin at home; the liar first deceives himself. 
And woe to that man who has so abused his 
gift of vision that he cannot tell light from 
darkness. "If thine eye be full of darkness, 
thy whole body is full of darkness." John 
Burroughs has written an essay entitled 
"Straight Seeing and Straight Thinking." 

129 



130 JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 

Straight thinking depends upon straight see- 
ing, and a man always Hves as he thinks. 

Seeing is a psychological as well as a physio- 
logical process. The same object brings de- 
cidedly different pictures to different minds. 
Two men enter a library. One sees simply 
row after row of books, while the heart of the 
other leaps within him as he recognizes upon 
the shelves friends, well tried and true. The 
geologist can read the history of prehistoric 
seons where the rest of us see nothing but a 
few stones. As the train glides over the moun- 
tains, glowing with the ineffable beauty of the 
dying summer day, to the poet the autumn- 
tinted hills bring visions of apocalyptic splen- 
dor, but the gum-chewing, vacuous- voiced group 
across the aisle behold only trees and rocks. 
To some the sad-faced, toil-worn woman as 
she plods wearily along is only another unin- 
teresting member of the human race, but 
those who can really see read upon that wrinkled 
face "Sweet records promises as sweet." 

The richness and the fullness of our lives is in 
proportion to our power to see. To have eyes 
and to see not is to live a half life. 

John Ruskin has written these ultraemphatic 
but entirely truthful words: "The more I 
think of it the more I find this conclusion 
impressed upon me, that the greatest thing a 



CROSS-EYED SOULS 131 

human soul ever does in this world is to see 
something and tell what it saw in a plain way, 
Hundreds of people can talk for one who can 
think, but thousands can think for one who 
can see." Sometimes the eloquent words of 
Ruskin are almost as hopeless as the wailings 
of a Cassandra among the flames of Troy. 
But whether they be optimistic or pessimistic, 
facts are facts. The number of those who 
positively will not see is anything but small. 
There is no royal road to truth of any kind. 
To learn really to see is not the easiest of 
lessons. Truth can be attained only by those 
who dare to scale the cold and rugged heights. 
It is easy for prejudice or selfishness to blind 
the eye of man. 

Several years ago a newspaper, in chron- 
icling the demise of one who had taken too 
much opium, appeared with an article headed, 
"Died of an Overdose of Opinion." Printer's 
errors must not, of course, be taken too seri- 
ously. But if "an overdose of opinion" were 
fatal, many of us who are to-day in the land 
of the living would have long since shuffled 
off this mortal coil. The world is full of well- 
meaning people who pronounce offhand judg- 
ments upon the gravest and most complicated 
matters. The oracles of the village grocery 
and barber shop are most militantly cocksure 



132 JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 

in regard to the problems of labor and capital, 
the management of armies and navies, and 
the conduct of government at home and 
abroad. There are those who read nothing 
but the headlines and the sporting page, who 
do not hesitate to discourse learnedly upon 
the gravest of international questions. It is 
the immature student who knows the most 
about curriculums and discipline. Ignorance is 
always dogmatic. 

The truth-seeker and the truth-finder are 
always openminded. All knowledge which man 
wins is a revealer of new fields lying in the 
distance. Books which in other years were 
regarded as ultimate wisdom to-day gather 
dust upon library shelves. In many fields 
of intellectual activity the more light, the 
less certainty. The great scholar is tolerant; 
the unilluminated grammarian regards the 
printed word of the pedant as final, worthy 
to be written upon tables of stone. Ignorance 
is dogmatic in regard to its own viewpoint 
and full of contemptuous pity for all who 
differ with it. It is easy to have essentially 
the same attitude toward life as the old lady 
who in a discussion of church unity amiably 
remarked: "What's the use of having so many 
denominations.'* Why can't everybody be 
sensible and be a Methodist?" Dogmatism 



CROSS-EYED SOULS 133 

means intellectual blindness. Truth cannot be 
really attained by those who view it from only 
one side. "Dearly beloved brethren," ex- 
postulated Oliver Cromwell with a group of 
dogmatic clericals, "I beseech you by the 
mercies of God to realize that you may be 
mistaken." In all of the fields of human en- 
deavor there are still untold mysteries. We 
but know in part. We see only through a 
glass darkly. Absolute knowledge is not the 
portion of man. In the presence of the vast 
unknown it is for the children of men to walk 
humbly with open minds and receptive hearts. 

Sometimes there is a great gulf fixed between 
what we want to do and what we ought to do. 
There is always a danger of our substituting 
desire for duty. We are tempted even to allow 
our inclinations to mold our principles. When 
we do wrong our tendency is to make excuses. 
Therefore we are prone to adapt our ethics 
to our deeds. But there is always hope for 
an honest man. No matter how many mis- 
takes one has made, if he is sincere enough 
and brave enough to acknowledge his errors, 
he has not entirely lost the right path. 

The degeneration of a soul is the most 
gripping and heartrending of human tragedies. 
Spiritual disaster comes not in an hour. In 
the West Indies there is an insect which eats 



134 JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 

out the heart of a pillar while it is to all appear- 
ances sound. Tampering with one's loyalty 
to truth has a subtle but certain disintegrating 
influence upon the character and personality. 
It may be that in a moment of unguarded 
weakness sin enters a life. But God is ever 
merciful; the door of the Father's house is 
never closed to the poor prodigal. Yet the 
man who in order to justify his wrongdoings 
refuses to acknowledge them to be sins, closes 
the door of hope upon himself. The prodigal 
who makes himself believe that the licentious 
life of the far country is manly and honorable 
journeys farther and farther from the lights 
of home. 

Oscar Wilde, a man from whose life others 
walked backward with averted gaze, once 
said, "I remember when I was at Oxford say- 
ing to one of my friends as we were strolling 
around Magdalen's narrow, bird-haunted walks 
one morning in the year before I took my 
degree, that I wanted to eat of the fruit of all 
the trees in the garden of the world and, that 
I was going out into the world with that pas- 
sion in my soul." Wilde tried to justify his 
sin by giving expression to a noxious, mephitic 
philosophy of life. But sin is sin and cannot 
be purified by paragraphs of vapid, high- 
sounding words. 



CROSS-EYED SOULS 135 

"If you must, be a pig 
In and out of season, 
But do not justify it with a big 
Philosophic reason." 

Cut in the stone above the chancel in the 
chapel of one of the historic American pre- 
paratory schools, in the words of the heroic 
Apostle to the Gentiles is the motto of the 
institution, "Whatsoever things are true." A 
life philosophy built around these words will 
always ring true. Emerson said, "The world 
is upheld by the veracity of good men; they 
make the earth wholesome." The materialism 
of which Thomas Henry Huxley was the chief 
protagonist is to-day without defenders. But 
Huxley himself is still a potent influence. His 
life, written by his son, is a biography which 
no alert, idealistic youth can afford to leave 
unread. The tremendous influence of this 
Victorian scientist is due to his unswerving 
devotion to truth. His son and biographer 
writes, "If wife and child," he said, "were 
all lost to me, one after another, I would 
not he." 

A number of years ago the editor of a great 
American newspaper was in Paris. The ques- 
tion arose as to whether the paper should join 
the party with which it was allied in support- 
ing a policy which this publication had for 



186 JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 

years opposed. To break with the party meant 
loss, perhaps bankruptcy. A cable was sent 
to the old chief in Paris. Without delay came 
the answer, "Never compromise with dis- 
honor.'* Faithfulness to truth in the abstract 
is easy, but a man is to be measured by his 
attitude toward the concrete problems which 
he is called to face. Tampering with facts in 
order to make a case is sinning against one's 
soul. Truth must not be roughly handled. 
To see the truth, to speak it, and to act it 
with constancy and precision is one of the 
world's most difficult tasks. To gloss over 
realities in the name of a silly optimism is to 
sell the soul to the demons of falsehood. It 
is not a virtue to call black white. In one of 
Ruskin's noblest passages we read: "I do not 
mean to diminish the blame of the injurious 
and malicious sin of the selfish and deliberate 
falsity; yet it seems to me that the shortest 
way to check the darker forms of deceit is to 
set more scrupulous watch against those which 
have mingled, unregarded and unchastised, 
with the current of our life. Do not let us 
lie at all. Do not think of one falsity as harm- 
less, and another as slight, and another as 
unintended. Cast them all aside; they may be 
light and accidental; but they are an ugly 
soot from the smoke of the pit for all that; 



CROSS-EYED SOULS 137 

and it is better that our hearts should be swept 
clean of them, without ever caring as to which 
is the largest or blackest." 

We can never afford to sacrifice principle to 
expediency. Disloyalty to truth opens the door 
for other sins. Each falsehood begets many 
of its species. A nameless individual in trying 
to justify certain questionable practices to 
Samuel Johnson said, "A man must live." 
"I don't see the necessity," blurted out the 
sturdy old philosopher. The psalmist says, 
"The heathen are sunk down in the pit they 
made; in the net which they hid is their own 
foot taken." He who for any reason what- 
soever ignores the truth, digs a pit into which 
he himself is doomed to fall sooner or later; 
he hides a net in which his own feet eventually 
become enmeshed. Horace Bushnell's sermons 
mostly have epigrammatic titles which suggest 
their central thought. One bears the caption, 
*'The Capacity for Religion Extirpated by 
Disuse." It is true in general that any power 
which is not used atrophies. "That which is 
not expressed dies." The time comes when he 
who will not see cannot see. 

As the years take us farther away from the 
nineteenth century we are able to discern that 
among its other outstanding contributions to 
the world of thought must be numbered its 



138 JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 

bringing to the service of education, industry, 
and government that temper of mind which 
is known as scientific. It is entirely probable 
that the scientific spirit as applied by intel- 
lectual neophytes to philosophy and literature 
has been to a degree responsible for the arrant 
foolishness of those who have tried to me- 
chanicalize the spiritual. But above all else 
it stands for a passion for truth. In a college 
classroom where a student in attempting to 
translate from a continental language into 
English had on account of a ludicrous error 
become the object of the derisive laughter of 
the class, the professor remarked, "A guess 
is a good thing, provided we guess right." 
But, as a general rule, good guessing is based 
on knowledge. No flight of the imagination 
can take the place of a grasp of facts. The 
scientific temper means a love of truth and a 
hatred of falsehood. It means a willingness 
to face realities whether or not they accord 
with our prejudices or our interests. 

Amiel has made the striking statement that 
"The number of beings who wish to see truly 
is extraordinarily small." Whether this is an 
exaggeration or not, it is certainly true that 
no one ever sees clearly without wishing to see 
clearly. It is easy to quote Burns's rolhcking 
lines: 



CROSS-EYED SOULS 139 

"O wad some power the giftie gie us 
To see oursel's as others see us! 
It wad frae monie a blunder free us. 
And foolish notion." 

It may be, however, that others do not see us 
exactly as we are. Dr. Holmes, in the guise of 
the autocrat, showed how one of his table 
companions, "a young fellow answering to the 
name of John," had three distinct personahties: 

Three Johns 

1. The real John; known only to his Maker. 

2. John's ideal John; never the real one and often very 
unlike him. 

3. Thomas's ideal John; never the real John, nor 
John's John, but very often unlike either. 

The result of learning to know our real 
selves might not always be to the highest 
degree flattering. But without self-knowledge 
there can be no growth. A self -revealing mis- 
take may be a powerful incentive to progress. 
He who dares to know the truth walks in the 
light. A zeal for doing which is not allied 
with a passion for knowing is, to say the least, 
fraught with grave social perils. The last 
words of Goethe were, "Light! more light!" 
In an age of new problems, of industrial, polit- 
ical, and social chaos, when with phenomenal 
rapidity the old order yields place to the new. 



140 JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 

when we know not whither the tides of Hfe 
are hurhng us, the outstanding need of our 
generation is a clear and broad vision of the 
fundamental verities. The knowing of the 
truth is not always inevitably followed by the 
doing of the right. But without a firm grasp 
of essential truth there can be no progress, 
either individual or social. The first and great- 
est service that a human being can render to 
society is to be wholeheartedly honest with 
himself. 



IX 

THE AMERICAN HERITAGE 

Racially we Americans are a cosmopolitan 
people, but our spiritual heritage is of Anglo- 
Saxon lineage. It has come to us through the 
men who upon the rock-bound coast of New 
England and by the sloping banks of the rivers 
of old Virginia laid the foundations of future 
States. From the very first the gates of this 
new land "beyond the ocean bars" have been 
open to all light-seeking, truth-loving sons of 
men. The thirteen colonies long before the 
Revolution were inhabited by men and women 
of more than one race. In New York were 
the sturdy descendants of the unconquerable 
men of Holland, than whom no race has fought 
nobler battles for human liberty. In New 
Jersey and in Delaware were those who in 
memory still climbed the snowy hills of Sweden 
and heard her Sabbath bells. In the South, 
and even among the Puritans of New England, 
dwelt those of French names in whose veins 
coursed the blood of the Huguenots, who 

141 



142 JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 

for the sake of their fathers' faith, became 
fugitives and wanderers upon the face of the 
earth. In the Quaker Commonwealth of Wil- 
ham Penn, along with the peaceful Friend from 
English hedgerows and green Irish meadows, 
there dwelt men of Teutonic blood from the 
legend-haunted valley of the Rhine and the 
snowy peaks and hoary glaciers of liberty- 
loving Switzerland. And there too glowed 
the fire of Celtic hearts. In more than one 
sequestered vale even to-day the old Welsh 
names tell of those of the faith of Pennsylvania's 
founder who brought with them to the American 
wilderness the tradition of the storied hills 
and rugged mountains of little Wales. And 
beyond the blue ridges of the Alleghanies the 
militant dauntless Ulster Scot faced the ter- 
rors of the wilderness and led the westward 
march of empire. No part of these United 
States can trace its ancestry to one race alone. 
Neither are we a mere conglomerate of many 
races. We are a new people — not English, 
nor Irish, nor German, nor French, but 
Americans. 

In Bayard Taylor's "National Ode," read 
upon Independence Square, Philadelphia, July 
4, 1876, just once does the poet rise to the 
level of the momentous day and the memorable 
occasion. In speaking of his country he said: 



THE AMERICAN HERITAGE 143 

"No blood in her lightest veins 
Frets at remembered chains, 
No shame nor bondage has bowed her head. 
In her form and features still 
The unblenching Puritan will, 
Cavalier honor, Huguenot grave, 
The Quaker truth and sweetness. 
And the strength of the danger-girdled race 
Of Holland, blend in a proud completeness. 
From the homes of all, where her being began. 

Her Germany dwells by a gentler Rhine; 

Her Ireland sees the old sunburst shine; 

Her France pursues some dream divine; 

Her Norway keeps his mountain pine; 

Her Italy waits by the western brine; 

And broad-based under all 

Is planted England's oaken-hearted mood, 

As rich in fortitude 

As e'er went worldward from the island-wall! 

Fused in her candid light, 

To one strong race all races here unite." 

Here the poet, in language succinct and beau- 
tiful, gives expression to a fundamental fact 
of our national life. We are of many extrac- 
tions, but "one people with one language, 
the English language, and one flag, the Amer- 
ican flag." Many tributaries have flowed into 
the river of our American thought and ideals, 
but its source is unmistakably English. What- 
ever our race or sign, we are fundamentally 
Anglo-Saxon. 



144 JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 

We are heirs of the "great tradition" of the 
Anglo-Saxon line. It was for us that the 
sturdy barons at Runnymede wrested the Great 
Charter from a weak-kneed tyrant. It was 
for us that Cromwell and his Ironsides waged 
heroic warfare at Naseby and Marston Moor. 
It was for us that Burke in winged words 
uttered his burningly eloquent defense of the 
ancient English liberties. It was to protect 
these selfsame inalienable rights that American 
yeomen laid down their lives at Bunker Hill 
and Brandywine. But our political heritage is 
but a slender portion of the priceless inheritance 
which has come to us from beneath the somber 
skies of Old England. 

To be thankful that the English language is 
our language indicates no spirit of provincial 
narrowness. So indissolubly is our speech 
united with the best in our national life that 
he whose inner life is most adequately ex- 
pressed in another language and speaks in a 
foreign tongue and glorifies it at the expense 
of our national vernacular is fundamentally a 
foreigner. One lesson of the war which cannot 
be ignored is that the easier we make it for 
new citizens to retain the dialects and lan- 
guages of lands across the water, the harder 
will be the task of Americanization. To have 
for our national speech the language whose 



THE AMERICAN HERITAGE 145 

line has gone out to the uttermost parts of the 
earth, which to-day comes the nearest to be- 
ing really a world language, is not the least 
of our national blessings. And through our 
linguistic heritage our soul lives are deepened 
and broadened by contact with the noblest 
body of literature ever produced by any people 
in the annals of the human race. In speech 
at least Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Words- 
worth, Tennyson, and Browning are of us. 
This kinship in the starlit realms of literature 
with those who until the latest days will 
tower like sunken continents above oblivion's 
sea has in it something which should cast at 
least a faint "gleam" upon the barren fields 
of the most sordid and commonplace day. 

Mighty as may be the appeal to the Amer- 
ican heart of the supreme literature of the 
seagirt motherland, it is in the literary work 
of our own country that we find most clearly 
reflected our national life and ideals. Some- 
times a poet or novelist brings us far nearer 
to the heart of reality than the historian or 
philosopher. It is futile to discuss the silly 
academic question as to whether or not there is a 
distinctive American literature. The flowers of 
prose and poetry which have sprung from 
American soil are American and nothing else. 
In the literature of our nation we find nm*- 



146 JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 

rored forth our history and our outstanding 
characteristics. 

What are the quahties of mind and heart 
which differentiate Americans from other races 
of the human species? In the make-up of 
the "cosmopohtanly planned" citizen of this 
great new land are there ingredients which are 
new under the sun, or do we represent a new 
combination of human traits as old as the 
world? It does not take a vast amount of 
thinking to come to the conclusion that the 
latter question is the one which compels an 
affirmative answer. A great seer once said, 
"Mankind progresses; man ever remains the 
same." But it is worth while to notice a few 
of those elements of human nature which loom 
largest in the American mind and character. 

1. The real American is democratic. He 
rates a man according to his own merits rather 
than upon the height of his family tree. He 
believes that there is a real greatness latent in 
the commonest of the children of men. With 
Burns he says: 

"The rank is but the guinea's stamp, 
The man's the gowd for a' that." 

It must, of course, be admitted that there are 
within the borders of these United States 
some representatives of that species which 



THE AMERICAN HERITAGE 147 

Thackeray excoriated under the name of snob. 
But the would-be aristocrat and the real 
American can never dwell in the same tene- 
ment of clay. The American is open, frank, 
and free, both approaching and approachable. 
It has been said that the English people are 
like their own ale, "froth on top, dregs at the 
bottom, but sound in the middle." This 
description is by no means inapplicable to 
our own people. It must, moreover, be re- 
membered that the froth of humanity is just 
as worthless as the dregs. Among the froth 
of American life there are arrant snobs, and 
at the bottom we find the braying Bolshevist. 
But between these two extremes are solidity, 
strength, and real democracy. We can judge 
a people by their national heroes. Abraham 
Lincoln, who, as the years go by, is being 
more and more legendized and idealized, was 
simply "one of the folks." The plain frame 
house in Springfield which he left for the 
White House was a simple, typical American 
home. He was too big a man to have any 
place in his make-up for superficial, adventitious 
standards of judging his fellow men. And 
this characteristic of Lincoln is one of the 
distinctive marks of Americanism. In his 
outstanding essay on "Democracy," Lowell 
says that the democratic method is "such an 



148 JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 

organization of society as will enable men to 
respect themselves." 

It must be remembered that nowhere else 
do we come into such vital touch with the 
life of a people as upon the pages of their 
literature. There is a profound significance in 
the fact that our American literature is essen- 
tially democratic. It is true that there is an 
element of insularity in the literature of the 
New England renaissance. For some of the 
writers of that period Boston was verily "the 
hub of the solar system." But Longfellow, 
saturated as he was with the culture of the 
Old World, sang of the natural sorrows, losses, 
and joys which go to make up the common 
life of everyday men and women. Emerson 
stands out with translucent clearness as the 
great interpreter of our national democracy. 
He was limited in powers of human contact 
but catholic in his sympathy. In the literature 
of the older day the only place in which we 
find the democratic spirit lacking is in the 
writings of Dr. Holmes. No poetry is more 
distinctively American than that of Whittier, 
who wrote about common people for common 
people. Our American writers have not dealt 
with kings and barons, legendary or real. 
Upon their pages we do not come into contact 
with supermen or titanic amazons, but with 



THE AMERICAN HERITAGE 149 

men and women to whom we are drawn as it 
were by cords invisible because they are de- 
lightfully human. And the same note of sin- 
cere democracy is sounded in the most dis- 
tinctive writings of our own day. As we travel 
"North of Boston" with Robert Frost "Old 
hearths grow wide to make us room" as truly 
as did the old fireplace in the Whittier kitchen 
at Haverhill. In Masters and Sandburg we 
feel the mighty pulsations of the broad, free 
Middle West without knowing which no man 
can know America. It is not at all certain 
that when the mists of the present have rolled 
away we shall not come to see that in 
the writings of Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, 
and William Dean Howells we get nearer to 
the heart of American life than in any history 
which has been or will be written. Our na- 
tional literature is redolent of green meadows 
and running brooks, of broad fields, of tree- 
embowered villages and the thronging streets of 
the busy city. Everywhere it is permeated 
with "the folksiness of the folks." American 
literature is democratic because American life 
is democratic. 

2. Americans are a practical, achieving peo- 
ple. Our feet are always on the ground. By 
their fruits we judge them. We believe in "The 
nobility of labor — the long pedigree of toil." 



150 JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 

The Rooseveltian doctrine that idleness is 
criminality is a thought near the center of the 
typical American philosophy of life. Walt 
Whitman in "I hear America singing" images 
the poetry of common toil : 

"The shoemaker singmg as he sits at his bench. 
The hatter singing as he stands, 

The delicious singing of the mother or of the young wife 
At work, or the girl sewing or washing, 
Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else." 

Whittier's "Songs of Labor" gives us a virile 
American note and Dr. Henry van Dyke in 
his "Toiling of Felix" in lines of gentle beauty 

says^ : 

"Blessed are they that labor, for Jesus partakes of their 

bread, 
He puts his hand to their burdens, he enters their homes 

at night: 
Who does his best shall have as his guest, the Master 

of life and light. 

"This is the gospel of labor, ring it ye bells of the kirk! 
The Lord of Love came down from above, to live with 

the men who work. 
This is the rose that he planted, here in the thorn-curst 

soil; 
Heaven is blest with perfect rest, but the blessing of 

earth is toU." 



> Printed by permission of Charles Scribner's Sons, Publishers. 



THE AMERICAN HERITAGE 151 

The old monk's motto, Laborare est orare, does 
not need to be explained to tlie typical 
American. He not only believes it but he 
lives it. Our religion is intensely practical. 
The mysticism of our fathers has faded into 
the light of common day. Even in our spiritual 
lives we have become somewhat of the earth 
earthy. Of course in almost every community 
can be found the canting hypocrite who sub- 
stitutes the mechanical performance of mechan- 
ical rites for doing justice, loving mercy, and 
walking humbly with the Master. But in 
general the efficacy of a man's religion is 
measured by his loyalty to duty and his in- 
tegrity in his dealings with his fellow men. 
From our present-day viewpoint the criterion 
of the effectiveness of anything is workability. 
We have no time for theories. We minimize 
creeds. We are too practical to be concerned 
with the fundamental. Sometimes we are 
ready to start on a journey before the road 
is built. In fact, we have a tendency to push 
right on without bothering to inform ourselves 
as to our destination. James and Dewey with 
their pragmatism have brought philosophy 
from the clouds to the world of men. "If it 
works, it's true." "This," says the meta- 
physician, "is not philosophy. It is but a 
wild-goose chase." His contention may be 



152 JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 

true. But someliow, Professor James and 
his followers have told us something which we 
have all vaguely felt before anyone brought 
it to the surface and put it into words. At 
least they have formulated ideas which have 
long been in the atmosphere of our land and 
age. 

Our practicality naturally has the defects 
of its qualities. We are not a reverent people. 
Nothing upon earth or in the heavens above 
the earth or in the waters under the earth is 
safe from the jesting Yankee. Mark Twain's 
lack of reverence is typically American. Then, 
too, it cannot be denied that our practical- 
ness has tended to make us materialistic. 
But at all events we are no "idle dreamers 
of an empty day." In our faith there is no 
room for dead scholasticism or barren asceti- 
cism. And, after all, we are by no means 
deaf to the appeal of a noble idealism. We 
insist, however, upon our ideals being trans- 
lated into deeds. We are not satisfied with 
perfect theories in the closet. We demand 
those which will stand the test of the market 
place. Like Bunyan's hero, "Life, more life!" 
is our cry. 

3. The American is an instinctive pioneer. 
Even in the oldest parts of our country we are 
a new people, the children of immigrants. 



THE AMERICAN HERITAGE 153 

This is not without significance in the study 
of our national characteristics. He who leaves 
the home of his fathers for a new land is mostly 
an adventurous soul, who longs to find that 
which is "lost behind the ranges." The his- 
tory of the three centuries of life upon this 
continent is essentially the story of the pioneer. 
The conquest of the land between ocean and 
ocean is a veritable Odyssey of the frontier. 
What a mighty drama of history is compressed 
into Walt Whitman's vivid lines! — 

"All the past we leave behind, 
We debouch upon a newer, mightier world, varied world. 
Fresh and strong the world we seize, world of labor and 
the march. 
Pioneers! Pioneers! 

"We detachments steady throwing, 
Down the edges, through the passes, up the mountains 

steep. 
Conquering, holding, daring, venturing as we go the 
unknown ways. 
Pioneers! Pioneers! 

"All the pulses of the world. 
Falling in they beat for us, with the Westward move- 
ment beat. 
Holding single or together, steady moving to the front, 
all for us. 

Pioneers! Pioneers!" 

Roosevelt's Winning of the West, Churchill's 
The Crossing, and other books which tell of 



154 JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 

the westward march of Anglo-Saxon civiliza- 
tion are replete with tales of dauntless hero- 
ism. America has always faced the future. 

As a people we are not inclined to linger 
around the sunken reefs of the past. Spir- 
itually as well as physically we are of pioneer 
stock. In The American Scholar Emerson 
says, "The eyes of a man are set in his fore- 
head, not in his hindhead." And again: "Our 
day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to 
the learning of other lands, draws to a close. 
The millions that around us are rushing into 
life, cannot always be fed upon the sere re- 
mains of foreign harvests." Emerson's doc- 
trine of self-reliance, although "sicklied o'er'* 
with a nebulous Kantean transcendentalism, is 
intrinsically American. He is preeminently the 
prophet of individualism. "Trust thyself," he 
says, "every heart vibrates to that iron string." 
In America we find not types but individuals. 
That "goosestep efficiency" which was so much 
vaunted before 1914 was always a plant of 
slow growth upon this side of the Atlantic. 

We are not slavish imitators of those who 
have gone before, although it cannot be said 
that we have refused to avail ourselves of the 
lessons of the past. The windows of our hearts 
and minds are ever open to new light and 
new truth. We are not afraid of the untrodden 



THE AMERICAN HERITAGE 155 

pathway. We believe that a man's creed — 
pohtical, social, or religious — is not something 
that can be slipped on or off like a raincoat. 
It has to do with the life within. It cannot 
unchanged be transmitted from one genera- 
tion to another. Possibly there is no Amer- 
ican poem which makes a wider appeal to 
the idealism of college students than Lowell's 
"The Present Crisis." Never does a year pass 
without its being quoted many times in some 
undergraduate oration. Lines like these strike 
an answering chord in the heart of the twentieth 
century college boy: 

*"Tis as easy to be heroes as to sit the idle slaves 
Of a legendary virtue carved upon our fathers' graves, 
Worshipers of light ancestral make the present light a 

crime — 
Was the Mayflower launched by cowards, steered by men 

behind their time? 
Turn those tracks toward Past or Future, that make 

Plymouth Rock sublime? 

"New occasions teach new duties; Time makes ancient 
good uncouth; 

They must upward still and onward, who would keep 
abreast of Truth; 

Lo, before us gleam her camp-fires! We ourselves must 
Pilgrims be. 

Launch our Mayflower, and steer boldly through the 
desperate winter sea. 

Nor attempt the Future's portal with the Past's blood- 
rusted key." 



156 JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 

In such words the American speaks. 

4. The American is a patriot. When he 
quotes Daniel Webster and says, "I was born 
an American; I will live an American, and I 
will die an American," he is not uttering mere 
words. Edward Everett Hale's little story 
The Man Without a Country expresses an 
idea which is deeply rooted in our national 
life. It is seldom indeed that a citizen of the 
United States transfers his allegiance to any 
other country. There may be a scintilla of 
truth in Samuel Johnson's definition of patriot- 
ism as "the last refuge of a scoundrel." In 
speaking of his country it is easy for an in- 
sincere man eloquently to utter labored 
nothings. But more than once has the soul 
of America been tried in the grim crucible 
of war. On many a battle-torn field her sons 
have died to uphold her honor. During long 
years of peace the fires of patriotism have 
brightly burned upon om* national altars. It 
must, however, be admitted that there are in 
America those whose hearts have never thrilled 
with the noble emotion which we call "love 
of country." The life-detached intellectualist 
proudly proclaims himself an internationalist 
and refers to love of one's native land as 
"baby patriotism." A large section of the 
foreign-language press is shadowed with an 



THE AMERICAN HERITAGE 157 

intangible but ever-present hyphenism. There 
are American citizens of foreign birth or 
immediate descent who very frequently, for 
reasons of "loaves and fishes," make systematic 
efforts to impede the Americanization of those 
to whom they are aflBliated by race, by con- 
ducting propaganda in favor of foreign lan- 
guages and foreign customs. In addition we 
must reckon with the anti-social teaching 
which especially since the war has been dis- 
seminated throughout the country. It is also 
apparent that in those magazines which to-day 
find nothing in the world worthy of commenda- 
tion outside of Germany, Bolshevist Russia, 
and Sinn-Fein Ireland, the American note is 
very conspicuous by its absence. But in spite 
of these obnoxious manifestations the rank 
and file of American manhood and woman- 
hood in the truest and noblest sense of the 
word are patriotic. The crowds who in the 
summer throng into the Chautauqua tents in 
almost every town and village have no toler- 
ance for disloyalty in any form. The noise 
which hyphenism makes causes us to over- 
estimate the number in the ranks of the mal- 
contents. It is true that there must be no 
compromise with this type of dishonor, that 
we must lose no opportunity to check and 
counteract poisonous propaganda. We still. 



158 JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 

however, can quote with assurance Long- 
fellow's lines written in a much darker hour 
than the present: 

"Thou, too, sail on, O Ship of State! 
Sail on, O Union, strong and great! 

Fear not each sudden sound and shock, 

'Tis of the wave and not the rock; 

'Tis but the flapping of the sail. 

And not a rent made by the gale! 

In spite of rock and tempest's roar. 

In spite of false lights on the shore. 

Sail on, nor fear to breast the sea! 

Our hearts, our hopes are all with thee. 

Our hearts, our hopes, our prayers, our tears, 

Our faith triumphant o'er our fears. 

Are all with thee — are all with thee!" 

5. Idealism is a dominant American charac- 
teristic. When Arthur Balfour was on his 
visit to this country he said, "Because America 
was commercial it was easy to suppose that 
she was materialistic." "We are," ex-President 
Eliot, of Harvard, says, "the most idealistic 
people who have thus far inherited the planet. 
We are more idealistic in our conception of 
man, of God, and of the universe than any 
other people." It was a great ideal which 
sent the little Mayflower across the wintry 
sea. Men and women who are for the sake 
of their faith willing to break all of the precious 



THE AMERICAN HERITAGE 159 

ties uniting them to the land of their fathers 
represent the quintessence of ideahsm. The 
Pilgrim Fathers endured as seeing Him who 
is invisible. They looked beyond the transient 
to the eternal. "Their palaces were houses 
not made with hands; their diadems crowns 
of glory which should never fade away." As 
Moses Coit Tyler has eloquently told us, 
before the stumps were brown in their earliest 
harvest field or the wolves had ceased to howl 
nightly around their habitation they founded 
schools and colleges. In speaking of the first 
of these embryo colleges Dr. Holmes says: 

"And when at length the College rose, 

The sachem cocked his eye 
At every tutor's meager ribs 

Whose coat-tails whistled by; 
But when the Greek and Hebrew words 

Came tumbling from his jaws, 
The copper-colored children all 

Ran screaming to the squaws. 

"And who was on the Catalogue 

When College was begun? 
Two nephews of the President, 

And the Professor's son; 
(They turned a little Indian by. 

As brown as any bun;) 
Lord! how the seniors knocked about 

The freshman class of one!" 



160 JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 

But these little colleges on the seaboard were 
the expression of the same dauntless idealism 
which brought their founders across the sea. 
And these English Dissenters who planted on 
the barren New England the seeds of a new 
civilization have been beyond the peradventure 
of a doubt the most potent factors in the 
spiritual history of the American people. 

During the centuries that have passed, sons 
and daughters of every land as they followed 
the gleam have turned their steps toward 
America, the land of the ideal. Americans have 
never failed to hear the call of heroic service 
and knightly deeds. We as a people have 
learned that man does not live by bread alone. 
There have been times in American history 
when it has seemed as though ideals were 
upon the scaffold and materialism upon the 
throne. That period of American history be- 
tween Lincoln and Roosevelt does not make 
especially inspiring reading. The sublime ideal- 
ism which manifested itself in the Civil War 
reacted into sordidness and greed. But there 
never has been a time of no vision. Even 
days of darkness are illumined by some of the 
noblest names in our history. It is not with- 
out significance that Ralph Waldo Emerson, 
who more than any mirrored forth in his 
writings the life and thought of the first cen- 



THE AMERICAN HERITAGE 161 

tury of our national existence, was preeminently 
an idealist. "Do not," he said, "leave the 
sky out of your landscape." Another daring 
figure which thrills with the real Emersonian 
idealism is the often- quoted but never |thread- 
bare aphorism, "Hitch your wagon to a star." 
We are the sons of men and women who 
cherished ideals, who stood for the purity of 
the home, for personal integrity, for social 
helpfulness, and for a vital sense of the life 
of God in the soul of man. We belong to a 
generation which with no blot of selfishness 
upon our escutcheon helped to wage a great 
war. As a people and as individuals it is for 
us to conserve our honor, truth, and righteous- 
ness. The gleam that never was on land or 
sea must not be allowed to fade into the light 
of common day. 

Olympus cannot be crushed into a [nut- 
shell. The complex life of over a hundred 
million people cannot adequately be synthe- 
sized in a few paragraphs. Each American 
is not like every other American. We live in 
the land of magnificent distances, in an environ- 
ment which develops rather than represses 
individuality. But our dififerences are more 
obvious than real. Superficially we are 
heterogeneous, but fundamentally we are alike. 
Beneath the surface differences and the in- 



162 JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 

evitable distinctions arising from varying hered- 
itary and environistic influences are found the 
traits which characterize the American. As 
the wheels of time make their ceaseless revolu- 
tions "The thoughts of man are widened with 
the process of the suns." We have not yet 
scaled the highest mountain nor placed our 
banner upon its loftiest peak. We must not 
be satisfied with the virtues of our fathers. 
The American of to-morrow must be bigger 
and better than the American of to-day. 

Every experience is a key which opens the 
doors of life to newer and richer experiences. 
We stand upon the shoulders of our fathers. 
To equal them we must surpass them. The 
problems of to-day must not be faced in any 
despicable spirit of "after us the deluge." It 
is for us to pass the torch of idealism from the 
generations which have come and gone to 
those which are yet to be. 



PERMANENT VALUES IN THE 
BIGLOW PAPERS 

In American literature in the field of satire 
we have nothing better to show than Lowell's 
Biglow Papers. They deal with the living 
issues of a vital period of our history. The 
series of 1846-1848 gave expression to the 
deeply rooted opposition which existed to the 
Mexican War especially in New England, while 
that of 1862-1868 naturally reflects the tu- 
multuous days of the Civil War. These satires 
are keen, brilliant, and racy. Hosea Biglow, 
the forthright, hard-headed, exuberantly witty 
Yankee philosopher, is in himself a contribu- 
tion to literature. Above all else the Biglow 
Papers are American. They could not have 
been written outside of New England. They 
savor not of the library but of the soil. Lowell 
knew the Yankee's mind as well as his dialect. 
It is not hard for us to understand the popu- 
larity of these satires with the generation for 
whom they were written. But taking them 
in their entirety they are not especially in- 
spiring to the reader of to-day. It is hard for 

163 



164 JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 

a satire to win immortality. Most of us have 
little concern with the political quarrels of our 
grandfathers. Few care to lose themselves in 
the intricacies of midnineteenth-century pol- 
itics. Literary material weighted down with 
the transient is not interesting to posterity. 
The perennial interest of "The Courtin' " is 
evidence of the gulf fixed between it and the 
work as a whole. 

Yet, buried in dialect and almost entirely 
overwhelmed by comment upon forgotten con- 
troversies, there is a veritable Golconda of 
sparkling wit and rugged wisdom hewn from 
the quarries of life. The underlying thought 
of the poems is now only of historic interest. 
But the works are worth reading for their 
by-products. Shrewd, aptly phrased epigrams, 
which "Poor Richard" himself might have 
coined are to be found on many otherwise 
tedious pages. And here the student of Lowell 
comes into contact with truths as vital and 
dynamic to-day as when they first came 
bounding from the rapid pen of the poet. 

Words which have to do with loyalty to 
principle do not deal with any evanescent 
theme. More than one pungent stanza in 
these poems satirizes cant and insincerity. 
LowelP makes the self-seeking politician say: 

'The selections from Lowell are used by permission of Houghton 
Mifflin Company, Publishers. 



THE BIGLOW PAPERS 165 

"I du believe in prayer an' praise 

To him thet hez the grantin' 
O' jobs — in everythin' that pays, 

But most of all in Cantin' ; 
This doth my cup with marcies fill. 

This lays all thought o' sin to rest — 
I don't believe in prineerple, 

But oh, I du in interest." 

Again we read: 

"A marciful Providunce fashioned us holler 
O' purpose thet we might our princerples swaller; 
It can hold any quantity on 'em, the belly can, 
An' bring 'em ready fer use like the pelican. 
Or more like the kangaroo, who (wich is stranger) 
Puts her family into her pouch wen there's danger. 
Ain't prineerple precious? then who's goin' to use it 
Wen there's resk o' some chap's gittin up to abuse it? 
I can't tell the wy on't, but nothin' is so sure 
Ez thet prineerple kind o' gits spiled by exposure." 

With a few slight changes the following stanza 
would suit the self-seeking candidate of any 
time or place: 

"Ez to my princerples, I glory 

In hevin' nothin' o' the sort; 
I ain't a Wig, I ain't a Tory, 

I'm jest a canderdate, in short; 
Thet's fair an' square an' parpendicler. 

But, ef the Public cares a fig 
To have me an' thin' in particler, 

Wy, I'm a kind o' peri- Wig." 

It is also true that in some respects election 
to Congress has about the same influence 



166 JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 

upon some men to-day as it had in the time 
of Hosea Biglow: 

"So, wen one's chose to Congriss, ez soon ez he's in it, 
A collar goes right round his neck in a minit, 
An' sartin it is thet a man cannot be strict 
In bein' himself, wen he gits to the Deestrict, 
Fer a coat thet sets wal here in ole Massachusetts, 
Wen it gits on to Washinton, somehow askew sets." 

Perhaps the most contemptible type of 
hypocrite is the individual who eloquently 
fulminates against wrong in general and skill- 
fully avoids any reference to specific transgres- 
sions of the laws of right. Some one has given 
three rules which are to be followed if one is 
to avoid making enemies: "Say nothing, do 
nothing, be nothing." The opponent of wrong 
in the abstract follows all three of these rules 
and at the same time gulls many into be- 
lieving him to be a valiant soldier in the army 
of the common good. Sometimes the most 
pusillanimous coward is loudest in his thunders 
against remote wrong and distant sinners. 
Lowell pays his respects to this form of hypoc- 
risy in these lines of galling satire: 

"I'm willin' a man should go tollable strong 
Agin wrong in the abstract, fer thet kind o' wrong 
Is oilers unpop'lar an' never gits pitied, 
Because it's a crime no one never committed; 
But he mus'n't be hard on partickler sins, 
Coz then he'll be kickin' the people's own shins." 



THE BIGLOW PAPERS 167 

Lowell had a Carlylean hatred of insincerity 
and he possessed the power of finding the 
weak places in the armor of those against 
whom he lifted his well-pointed lance. 

Lowell's satire in the main concerns itself 
with politics, and, like much political writing, 
it is not especially characterized by fairness to 
those whom it criticizes. There are passages 
which impress us as simply shallow cleverness. 
Satire, nevertheless, has never been especially 
judicial. It is somewhat in the habit of taking 
sides. It was an utter impossibility for a red- 
blooded man like James Russell Lowell to be 
a colorless neutral. Right or wrong, he stood 
on his own feet, did his own thinking, and 
without hesitation or equivocation expressed 
his opinions in language which could not be 
misunderstood. 

Lowell owed much more of his make-up to 
his mother, who was of an old Orkney family 
and a descendant of the ballad hero. Sir 
Patrick Spens, than he did to the sturdy New 
England house of Lowell. He was, nevertheless, 
highly conscious of his Puritan heritage. What- 
ever the faults of the Yankee Ironsides, they 
were no namby-pamby weaklings. They were 
indeed men of present valor, "stalwart old 
iconoclasts." This characteristic of the men 
who in New England and America struck 



168 JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 

sledge-hammer blows for human freedom is 
set forth in "Sunthin' in the Pastoral Line" 
in the portrait of Hosea's "gret-gran'ther mul- 
tiplied by three." Through the old Crom- 
wellian, Lowell gives expression to more than 
one sentiment permeated with wisdom and 
strength. We read, for example, these words: 

" 'Wal, milk-an'-water ain't the best o' glue,' 
Sez he, 'an' so you'll find afore you're thru; 
Ef rashness venters sunthin', shilly-shally 
Loses ez often wut's ten times the vally.' " 

And again in the same poem we find this ring- 
ing exhortation: 

" 'Strike soon,' sez he, 'or you'll be deadly ailin' — 
Folks thet's afeerd to fail are sure o' failin'; 
God hates your sneakin' creturs thet believe 
He'll settle things they run away an' leave!' " 

To discuss the lasting value of the Biglow 
Papers without calling attention to the beau- 
tiful idyllic passages which take us near to 
the very heart of New England would mean 
the ignoring of some of the most charmingly 
realistic pictures of rural life and landscape 
to be found anywhere, except, possibly, upon 
the pages of Whittier. Again "Sunthin' in 
the Pastoral Line" yields rich treasure. For 
example: 



THE BIGLOW PAPERS 169 

"Jes* so our spring gits everythin' in tune. 
An' gives one leap from Aperl into June: 
Then all comes crowdin' in; afore you think, 
Young oak-leaves mist the side-hill woods with pink; 
The catbird in the laylock-bush is loud; 
The orchards turn to heaps o' rosy cloud; 
Red-cedars blossom tu, though few folks know it. 
An' look all dipt in sunshine like a poet; 
The lime-trees pile their solid stacks o' shade 
An' drows'ly simmer with the bees' sweet trade; 
In ellum-shrouds the flashin' hangbird clings 
An' for the summer vy'ge his hammock slings." 

"Mason and Slidell: A Yankee Idyll" con- 
tains a vivid picture with an atmosphere all 
its own: 

"I love to Titer there while night grows still. 
An' in the twinklin' villages about, 
Fust here, then there, the well-saved lights goes out. 
An' nary sound but watchdog's false alarms, 
Or muflBed cockcrows from the drowsy farms, 
Where some wise rooster (men act jest thet way) 
Stands to 't thet moon-rise is the break o' day." 

There are few stanzas with more poetry to 
the line than in the opening words of "The 
Courtin' ": 

"God makes sech nights, all white an' still, 
Fur 'z you can look or listen, 
Moonshine an' snow on field an' hill. 
All silence an' all glisten." 

In the apparently inexhaustible "Sunthin' in 



170 JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 

the Pastoral Line" there is another stanza of 
real poetry which combines humor, suggestive- 
ness, beauty, and inspiration: 

"*T wuz so las' Sabbath arter meetin'-time: 
Findin' my feelin's wouldn't noways rhyme 
With nobody's, but off the hendle flew 
An' took things from an east-wind pint o' view, 
I started off to lose me in the hills 
Where the pines be, up back o' 'Siah's Mills; 
Pines, ef you're blue, are the best friends I know. 
They mope an' sigh an' sheer your feelin's so; 
They hesh the ground beneath so, tu, I swan. 
You half fergit you've gut a body on. 
Ther 's a small school'us there where four roads meet, 
The doorsteps hollered out by little feet. 
An' sideposts carved with names whose owners grew 
To gret men, some on 'em, an' deacons, tu; 
't ain't used no longer, coz the town hez gut 
A high school, where they teach the Lord knows wut: 
Three-story larnin' 's pop'lar now; I guess 
We thriv* 'ez wal on jes' two stories less. 
Fur it strikes me ther 's sech a thing ez sinnin' 
By overloadin' children's underpinnin' ; 
Wal, here it wuz I lamed my ABC, 
An' it's a kind o' favorite spot with me." 

In **A Yankee Idyll" is one of the poet's 
most vital and ringing stanzas. There is 
something wrong with the American who can 
read it without his heart beating faster. It is 
an Iliad of the frontier, an Odyssey of the 
wilderness: 



THE BIGLOW PAPERS 171 

"O strange New World, thet yit wast never young. 
Whose youth from thee by gripin' need was wrung. 
Brown foundlin' o' the woods, whose baby bed 
Was prowled roun' by the Injun's craeklin' tread, 
An' who grew'st strong thru shifts an' wants an' pains, 
Nussed by stern men with empires in their brains. 
Who saw in vision their young Ishmel strain 
With each hard hand a vassal ocean's mane. 
Thou, skilled by Freedom an' by gret events 
To pitch new States ez Old- World men pitch tents. 
Thou, taught by Fate to know Jehovah's plan 
Thet man's devices can't unmake a man. 
An' whose free latch-string never was drawed in 
Against the poorest child of Adam's kin — 
The grave's not dug where traitor hands shall lay 
In fearful haste thy murdered corse away." 

In spite of parlor-anarchists, hyphenates, 
Bolshevists, and other traitors these last lines 
may still be read with confident assurance. 

To-day, better than we could a few years 
ago, we understand the tender pathos of these 
lines in which the love of winter beauty is 
overshadowed with an irrepressible longing for 
the dear, old, far-off days of peace: 

"Where's Peace? I start, some clear-blown night. 

When gaunt stone walls grow numb an' number. 
An', creakin' 'cross the snow-crus' white. 

Walk the col' starlight into summer; 
Up grows the moon, an' swell by swell 

Thru the pale pasturs silvers dimmer 
Than the last smile thet strives to tell 

O' love gone heavenward in its shimmer. 



172 JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 

"Snowflakes come whisperin' on the pane, 
The charm makes blazin' logs so pleasant. 
But I can't hark to wut they're say'n'. 
With Grant or Sherman oilers present; 

"Or up the slippery knob I strain 

An' see a hundred hills like islan's 
Lift their blue woods in broken chain 

Out o' the sea o' snowy silence; 
The farm-smokes, sweetes' sight on airth, 

Slow thru the winter air a-shrinkin'. 
Seem kin' o' sad, an' roun' the hearth 

Of empty places set me thinkin'." 

It is not minimizing Lowell to say that he is 
by no means one of the great figures in the 
world's literature. But he has made con- 
tributions to our American letters without 
which we would be immeasurably poorer. It 
can also be said of him that no other writer 
has written in dialect lines so pathetically 
beautiful and enchantingly melodious. 

But some of the pithiest lines in the two 
series are found detached from any other out- 
standing thought or expression. Consequently, 
many of them are all but lost to a very large 
proportion of modern readers. Yet these 
scintillating epigrams are replete with sug- 
gestions and homely common sense. Their 
name is legion, and the examples given are 
typical rather than inclusive: 



THE BIGLOW PAPERS 173 

"Democ'acy gives every man 
The right to be his own oppressor." 

"My gran'ther's rule was safer'n 't is to crow: 
Don't never prophesy — onless ye know." 

"(Why I'd give more for one bobolink 
Than a square mile o' larks in printer's ink.)" 

"Now don't go oflF half-cock; folks never gains 
By usin' pepper-sarse instid o' brains." 

"It's no use buildin' wut's a-goin to fall." 

Here are two lines which each new generation 
needs to remember: 

"Young folks are smart, but all ain't good thet's new; 
I guess the gran'thers they knowed sunthin' tu." 

Few other writers could have expressed the 
following thought without falling into banality 
or irreverence: 

"An' you've gut to git up airly 
Ef you want to take in God." 

In one of his satiric congressional speeches 
two thoughts highly worthy of quotation are 
sententiously expressed : 

"But The'ry is jes' like a train on the rail, 
Thet, weather or no, puts her thru without fail. 
While Fac's the old stage thet gits sloughed in the ruts. 
An' hez to allow for your darned efs an* buts. 



174 JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 

An' folks don't want Fourth o' July t' interfere 
With the business consarns o' the rest o' the year. 
No more 'n they want Sunday to pry an' to peek 
Into wut they are doin' the rest o' the week." 

It would be hard to find an apter comment 
upon certain phases of the Puritan character: 

"Pleasure does make us Yankees kind o' winch, 
Ez though 't wuz sunthin' paid for by the inch; 
But yit we du contrive to worry thru, 
Ef Dooty tells us thet the thing's to du. 
An kerry a hoUerday, ef we set out, 
Ez stiddily ez though 't wuz a redoubt." 

Hume cynically remarked that the Puritans 
hated bear-baiting not because it gave pain 
to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to 
the people. This falsehood contained just 
enough truth to make it effective. Lowell's 
lines express the truth of the aphorism of the 
Scottish historian, but are without that which 
made Hume's witticism palpably unjust. More 
than once has the New England satirist in this 
fashion packed whole chapters of social psy- 
chology into a few pregnant sentences. 

Another example of this is found in the 
following lines from which no real student of 
humanity will think of dissenting: 

"An' yit I love th' unhighschooled way 
or farmers hed when I wuz younger; 
Their talk wuz meatier, an' 'ould stay 

While book-froth seems to wet your hunger; 



THE BIGLOW PAPERS 175 

For puttin' in a downright lick 

'twixt Humbug's eyes ther's few can meteh it. 
An' then it helves my thoughts ez slick 

Ez stret-grained hickory doos a hetchet." 

In speaking of the Biglow Papers Charles 
Sumner said, "It's a pity that they are not 
written in the English language." Sumner 
represented that group of would-be super- 
intellectuals to whom writing in dialect is 
the committing of a sin against the most 
sacred literary conventionalities. Lowell's use 
of the Yankee dialect in the Biglow Papers 
enhanced their literary value because it gave 
them a closer contact with life. They are 
rooted in the very soil of New England. They 
give expression to the philosophy of an un- 
common common man. Hosea Biglow is not 
a type but an individual. He has all of Lowell's 
own brilliancy and penetration. This was not 
true of every Yankee farmer, but it was true 
of some. The fact that Lowell had the dra- 
matic power to express himself through such 
a rugged personality is not the least of the 
evidences of his title to a literary preeminence. 
This Harvard professor and exemplar of a rich 
cosmopolitan culture never lost his contact 
with the common things of life. 

Lowell, like most of the towering figures of 
literature, again and again stressed certain 



176 JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 

dominant ideas. These are at the center of 
his teaching. In many instances these out- 
standing truths are expressed time after time 
in the two series of dialect poems. The pres- 
ence of wit does not mean the absence of 
wisdom. In one of his essays he speaks of 
those individuals who "have been sent into 
the world unfurnished with the modulating and 
restraining balance wheel which we call a sense 
of humor." 

To this group all work of humor is vanity 
and vexation of spirit. Others, however, in 
the Biglow Papers will come into contact with 
some of the ripest, richest, and most virile 
thoughts in American literature. In these 
poems we find more of Lowell than in any 
other work that came from his pen. 



XI 

LESSENING THE DENOMINATOR 

It is in Sartor Resartus that we read the 
somewhat enigmatic sentence: "The Fraction 
of Life can be increased in value not so much 
by increasing your Numerator as by lessening 
your Denominator." Few men have made a 
more consistent effort to do this than Henry 
David Thoreau. Walden is the story of a 
sincere effort to increase the value of life by 
lessening the denominator. The book is drawn 
from a journal which the eccentric naturalist 
kept during the two years in which he lived 
in the shanty on the banks of Walden Pond. 
The book is interesting not so much because 
it tells of the author's ability to support him- 
self upon the princely sum of seventeen cents 
a week, but rather on account of its giving 
expression to a luminous and distinctively 
individualistic philosophy of life. 

The life of Thoreau could not be taken as 
a model. It was egoistic rather than social. 
After his death his friend and mentor, Emer- 
son, wrote of him: "He was bred to no pro- 
177 



178 JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 

fession; he never married; he never voted; 
he refused to pay a tax to the State; he ate no 
flesh, he drank no wine; he never knew the use 
of tobacco; and, though a naturaHst, he used 
neither trap nor gun." Not all of these devi- 
ations from the typical life of his generation 
can be looked upon as virtues. For most of 
us Thoreau's two years of existence in the 
woods would not be ideal. After Whittier read 
the book he pronounced it "capital reading," 
but continued, "The practical moral of it seems 
to be that if a man is wilhng to sink himself 
into a woodchuck he can live as cheaply as 
that quadruped; but, after all, for me, I prefer 
walking on two legs." Such a reaction is easy 
to understand, but it is, nevertheless, decidedly 
unjust. The central thought of the volume is 
found in the words: "A man is rich in pro- 
portion to the number of things which he can 
afford to let alone." Brander Matthews says 
Walden is a "most wholesome warning to all 
those who are willing to let life itself be smoth- 
ered out of them by luxuries they have allowed 
to become necessaries." 

In one of the cleverest, but unfairest essays 
which came from his pen, Lowell without 
mercy excoriates Thoreau and his philosophy 
of life. But in spite of himself, Lowell gets to 
the heart of the significance of the Walden 



LESSENING THE DENOMINATOR 179 

experiment and admits that its "aim was a 
noble and useful one in the direction of plain 
living and high thinking." It was a protest 
against the tendency of the American to be- 
come the slave of his possessions. The story 
is told that a friend attempted to present 
Thoreau with a mat to be placed in front of 
the door of the Walden hut, but he unhesi- 
tatingly refused it. He said that by wiping 
his feet on the grass he could save himself 
the trouble of taking care of another article. 
Henry Thoreau may have been an extremist. 
However, it is possible that it would be better 
for an individual to follow his example rather 
than to make himself the slave of a clutter 
of a conglomerate of objects neither beautiful 
nor useful. It was not many years ago that 
the largest and best-located room in the 
American home was filled with haircloth furni- 
ture, crayon portraits in hideous frames, and 
other aesthetic monstrosities, and then merci- 
fully closed for about three hundred and sixty- 
four days of the year; but visited frequently by 
the industrious housewife, who must keep her 
treasures free from the defiling presence of 
dust. Even to-day thousands of American 
women are the servants of their dwelling 
places. More than one life has been shortened 
by utterly useless labor. Walden is a sermon 



180 JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 

against the sin of Marthaism. A person 
"troubled about many things" has no time to 
master the art of Hving. 

Thoreau has been criticized because instead 
of making money by manufacturing lead pen- 
cils, he took time to enjoy life in his own 
peculiar way. He could say like Walt Whitman, 

"I loaf and invite my soul." 

It must be admitted that not every loafer 
invites his soul to be a partner in his enter- 
prises. The typical American, however, is 
likely to be too busy to realize that he is 
a being fundamentally spiritual. "Young 
people," said a college professor to one of his 
classes, "y<^^ ^^^^ ^^ though you spent twice 
as much time studying as you should." The 
jaded-looking group perceptibly brightened, but 
he continued as follows, "But you recite as 
though you did not spend half enough time 
at your books." It is easy indeed to be tre- 
mendously busy doing nothing. In Chaucer's 
Prolog there is a typical and delightful couplet 
in which the poet says of one of his characters, 

"Nowher so busy as a man as he ther nas. 
And yet he seemed bisier than he was." 

A life can be buried beneath futile details, 
Richard Brinsley Sheridan gives some good 



LESSENING THE DENOMINATOR 181 

advice when he says, "Now and then be idle; 
sit and think." No more precious gift is 
intrusted to our stewardship than that of time. 
A man's very soul may be entombed beneath a 
mountain of trivialities. EflSciency depends not 
only upon knowing what to do, but also upon 
a knowledge of what to leave undone. He 
who allows trifles to dominate his life narrows 
his vision and impedes his usefulness. Ex- 
treme busyness is America's besetting sin. 
The securing of leisure is not only a privilege 
but a duty. Thoreau at least mastered those 
elements of truth which the world contained 
for his especial acquisition. The writing of at 
least one volume which has an assured place 
among the classics of American literature 
would alone be a fairly creditable showing for 
a life of little more than forty years. How 
many of Thoreau's merciless critics have that 
much to their credit? 

Diogenes once said, "Lord, I thank thee 
that there are so many things which Diogenes 
can do without." It is, indeed, easy for a 
man to allow himself to be made the slave of 
things. The "high cost of living" presents a 
problem that is decidedly real, but by its side 
is the equally vital question of the cost of 
"high living." In the American life of to-day 
it would be hard to draw the line between 



182 JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 

that which is spent on pleasure or luxury and 
that spent on display. Sometimes we buy to 
please Mrs. Grundy. Our richer neighbor has 
something, and therefore we must have it, 
whether we can afiford it or not. This fearful 
and merciless competition in the possession of 
things has for decades been one of the baneful 
influences of modern life. Thoreau says: "The 
cost of a thing is the amount of what I will 
call life, which is required to be exchanged 
for it, immediately or in the long run." Many 
times the price of display or luxury has meant 
the sacrificing of the higher values of life. For 
our own generation there is a mournful truth 
in Wordsworth's lines: 

"The world is too much with us; late and soon. 
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers." 

Life is more than a matter of getting and 
spending. Of course Thoreau's teaching is no 
solution for the burning and social economic 
issues which with every month seem to be 
looming larger and larger. But the philosophy 
of Walden contains truths which just now are 
preeminently vital. During the war we learned 
that there were many supposed necessities 
with which we could do without and suffer 
no serious inconvenience. It was hoped that 
our national baptism of blood would cure us 



LESSENING THE DENOMINATOR 183 

of our debauch of luxury. But still there are 
those to whom the recent years have brought 
more money than they ever dreamed of pos- 
sessing. And wealth without a knowledge of 
how to use it is a curse. Every decade seems 
to wallow deeper and deeper in the mire of 
luxury. The severe and simple life of the 
fathers frequently is replaced by a soft and 
luxurious life on the part of the later genera- 
tion. In the best sense of the word wealth 
is a national blessing, but there are circum- 
stances where the proper name for it is what 
Ruskin terms "illth." No people has ever 
been able to endure an excess of luxury for any 
long period. Giving preeminence to "things" 
means the degradation of manhood and -woman- 
hood. Thoreau by reducing the material part 
of life to its simplest elements taught us a 
lesson which it would not be wise for us to 
forget. 

"I have traveled much," said Thoreau, "in 
Concord." He himself lived not extensively 
but intensively. Men have journeyed around 
the world and have seen much less than that 
which this eccentric New Englander saw by 
the banks of Walden pond. Sometimes it 
would be much wiser for us to reread an old 
book than to make the acquaintance of a new 
one. Superficial study means shallow, loose- 



184 JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 

thinking manhood and womanhood. Hum- 
boldt unjustly spoke of an eminent American 
writer as having traveled the farthest and seen 
the least of any man in the world. The num- 
ber of miles which a man covers means nothing. 
What we bring back from a journey depends 
upon what we take with us. To him that 
hath shall be given. One truth studied from 
all sides has in it more that is really educative 
than a casual acquaintance with everything 
beneath the sun. No sane man would to-day 
repeat with reference to himself Bacon's never- 
to-be-forgotten phrase: "I take all knowledge 
to be my province." Range and breadth of 
thought are poor substitutes for thoroughness 
and depth. Agassiz would have a student 
spend day after day upon the study of a 
single fish. It is easy for a hurried, nervous 
traveler to bring home nothing but a confused 
mass of mental chaos. A renowned globe 
trotter when interrogated in regard to Da 
Vinci's Mona Lisa said that if the painting 
were in the Louvre he must have seen it be- 
cause he spent over three hours in that gal- 
lery. There are those who seem to have read 
so much that they have forgotten everything. 
Abraham Lincoln's lack of access to many 
books was not an unmixed misfortune. What 
he learned he learned. A man who knows one 



LESSENING THE DENOMINATOR 185 

village as Thoreau knew Concord and its 
environs is better educated than the pro- 
fessional wanderer upon the face of the earth. 
Most of us are satisfied to live upon the sur- 
face. Life becomes insipid because even though 
having eyes we see not. 

Another great book is Gilbert White's The 
Parish of Selbourne, the result of an English 
clergyman's study of the natural history of a 
village and countryside. John Burroughs has 
found material for more than one idyll in and 
around an old hay barn. Jane Austin studied 
the commonplace lives of insignificant people 
and developed an unsurpassable power of 
analyzing the human mind and heart. The 
villager knows human nature better than the 
dweller in the city. His opportunities for an 
intensive study of his neighbors have been 
exceptionally good, and on account of the lack 
of other distractions he does not neglect to 
avail himseK of his advantages along these 
lines. G. Stanley Hall once made the thought- 
provoking statement that all psychology has 
its origin in gossip. Thoreau found natiu*e and 
life near at hand of such thrilling interest that 
he did not have to rush hither and yon in 
search of new excitement in order to prevent 
his life from becoming flat and inane. 

It must not be thought, though, that Thoreau 



186 JOHN RUSKIN, PREACHER 

was provincial-minded. He had spent four 
years at Harvard, although he had not re- 
ceived his diploma on account of his refusing 
to pay the fee demanded for the sheepskin, 
his reason being that in his opinion it was not 
worth the price. His professors did not know 
what to make of the independent youth from 
Concord. Yet his days at Cambridge were 
not wasted. The quotations which are rather 
generously scattered through his writings show 
a wide and intelligent reading. His back- 
ground was large enough to give a perspective 
for the study of the life near at hand. He 
was not like Goethe, who sat dreaming while 
the guns of earth-shaking battles were boom- 
ing around him. His patriotism, like every- 
thing else about him, was highly distinctive. 
But he at least kept his finger upon the great 
throbbing pulse of his time. Concord, however, 
was the center of the world in which Thoreau 
lived. Because he knew the life near at hand, 
all that he said and wrote is singularly vital. 
His feet were planted upon solid earth. 

Life for all of us is made up of compromises. 
No man, however sincere and noble his motives, 
can do exactly as he pleases. Sometimes we 
must take half of the loaf or go breadless. 
But this was not the philosophy of Thoreau. 
He was no compromiser. ♦ No man conceded 



LESSENING THE DENOMINATOR 187 

less to society; yet no man was more loyal to 
his obligations to his fellowmen. He did his 
work as a surveyor with such faithfulness that 
those who followed him found his lines correct 
to the smallest detail. His philosophy of life 
was indeed one of "plain living and high think- 
ing." He uttered truths to which his fellow 
countrymen still need to listen. There is no 
better way of raising the value of the fraction 
of a life than by decreasing the denominator. 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



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